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INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Other Books bp G. C. W. Patrick 












THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUC- 
TION 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELAXATION 


HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston AND NEw YORK 


ai OF PHN 
<“V PON 
NO’ 13 1995 






INTRODUCTION 
PHILOSOPHY 


4 
Lc osieat sens” 


BY / 


j 


GEORGE THOMAS WHITE PATRICK, Ph.D. 


PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 


BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO 


HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 


Ruskin House, 40, Museum Street, W.C. 1 


The Riverside Press 
CAMBRIDGE - MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


PREFACE 


Tuts book is intended as an introductory text in philosophy 
for college and university students, and as a guide book for the 
general reader who would like to find his way into this interest- 
ing field of inquiry. It sets forth no system of philosophy — at 
least I hope not. The purpose of philosophy is to impel to 
thought, not to satisfy inquiry with a “system.” 

Nevertheless, the book is not wholly impersonal. Theoreti- 
cally, perhaps, one who writes an elementary introduction to 
philosophy should place impartially before the reader the va- 
rious theories, reserving any comment of hisown. But I doubt 
whether people like to read a wholly impersonal book. They 
enjoy an impartial book, but not an impersonal one. Readers 
usually like to get the viewpoint of the author, if only in a foot- 
note. I have, therefore, not hesitated to indicate my own views, 
or at least to point out the direction from which the light seems 
tome tocome. In this critical and individualistic age such a 
method is not likely to lead the reader astray. He will think 
for himself anyway. 

The general standpoint of the book is, I suppose, realistic 
and pluralistic, and I hope theistic; certainly idealistic, and 
quite unmistakably optimistic. Furthermore, the validity of 
the realistic standpoint of the special sciences is quite shame- 
lessly assumed, and it is taken for granted that they deal with 
realities and not with appearances. In accordance with this 
plan I have left to a late chapter the whole subject of epis- 
temology, believing that much confusion and discouragement 
may be avoided by beginning objectively after the manner of 
the special sciences. Finally, I have dwelt upon the similarities 
among philosophical systems rather than upon their differences; 
for while the study of philosophy must stimulate thought, it 
should not discourage persistent thinking by engendering a 
cynical skepticism. And, indeed, I think it is quite time to call 


v1 PREFACE 


attention to the agreements rather than the disagreements in 
philosophy. 

The divergence of philosophical systems is a theme dear to 
the critics of philosophy, ancient and modern. But certainly 
in these later years a most encouraging convergence is beginning 
to manifest itself, giving promise of a real progress comparable 
with that of the physical sciences. Rationalism and Em- 
piricism, for instance, as genetically approached by Professor 
Dewey, are now seen in friendly converse; Mechanism and 
Vitalism seem about to merge into some theory of creative 
evolution; while even Idealism and Naturalism, of old the most 
uncompromising of enemies, no longer appear wholly irrecon- 
cilable. If, with Norman Kemp Smith in his recent Pro- 
logomena to an Idealistic Theory of Knowledge, we define 
Idealism as a term covering all those philosophies which agree 
in maintaining that spiritual values have a determining voice 
in the ordering of the Universe; and Naturalism as the view 
that all these values emerge and begin to vindicate their real- 
ity at some late stage in the process of evolution, it is only at 
first sight that these two theories appear contradictory. Why 
may not spiritual values emerge late in evolution and yet have 
a determining voice in the ordering of the Universe? If we 
think of the whole world as a movement in the realization of 
these values, then the various steps in the evolutionary pro- 
gram would be regarded simply as indispensable stages in this 
realization. 

The differences between Idealism and Naturalism appear 
still further softened by our newer knowledge of matter and 
our newer conception of mind. Some one, quoted by Hoernlé, 
says, ‘‘We know too much about matter now to be material- 
ists.’ Perhaps he should have said, ‘‘We know too much 
about matter now to have any fear of Materialism.” If still 
held, this theory would apparently have lost its reputation for 
being mechanistic, atheistic, irreligious, or even monistic. And 
as for Naturalism, we are finding Nature to be an immensely 
more complicated affair than in the innocent days of Herbert 
Spencer and the early Darwinians, so that there might be 


PREFACE vii 


room in it for almost anything — for instance, secondary qual- 
ities, universals, even Platonic Ideas. Thus, if the antithesis 
between Naturalism and Idealism has not melted away, at any 
rate the alleged leanness and meagerness of the former are no 
longer in evidence. 

Idealism, too, is changing its character and losing its harsher 
aspects. Its subjectivistic forms are harder and harder to 
maintain. Many now call themselves idealists who claim 
neither that the world is dependent upon mind, nor the pro- 
duct of mind, nor a manifestation of the absolute, nor made of 
-mind-stuff. It is sufficient to say that spiritual values are the 
significant things, that is, the real things in the Universe, and 
that perhaps they have a determining voice in its ordering. 

I have just been reading the thoughtful article by Professor 
Urban in the Philosophical Review for September, 1923, on 
“Origin and Value.”’ The author is much troubled by the 
attitude of philosophical modernism in its dissociation of 
hitherto faithful connections of ideas, the most serious of which 
is the dissociation of origin and value, or value and reality; and 
among modernisms he finds the doctrine of emergents, creative 
resultants, and epigenesis, the most flagrant offenders against 
these faithful connections. 

I agree with Professor Urban that the dissociation of value 
and reality would indicate the decadence of philosophy, but I 
cannot agree that the dissociation of origin and value would 
be equally fatal. The views indicated in this book as promis- 
ing paths for the reader to explore are certainly sympathetic 
with the epigenetic and emergent theories — but surely this 
does not indicate a divorce of value and reality. I cannot be- 
lieve that all values and all realities are to be packed into ori- 
gins, nor do I see any reason why the world may not be a blos- 
soming-out process, in which new values are constantly real- 
ized. Even if we speak of these new values as novelties, there 
is no necessary divorce of value and reality. But if there are 
laid up somewhere in the heavens patterns by which we measure 
these values, even then there is no reason why they may not 
emerge in any given local program of evolution. 


Vili PREFACE 


But I wonder whether there is not some profounder truth 
than is expressed in either of these views. Could we not think 
of the world as “‘biocentric” and “‘ psychotropic,” as hungering 
and thirsting after righteousness, as longing for beauty and 
truth and goodness, without thinking of these values as en- 
visaged, or willed, or created after any type or pattern? Re- 
flecting much on Aristotle, some such view as this has been 
often in my mind while writing the pages which follow. Matter 
is taking on form, and the form is life and mind and social or- 
ganization and art and science and philosophy and religion; 
and all these are values, and they have a determining voice in 
the ordering of the world, because all which precedes them is 
indispensable to them. Hence I do not believe that there need 
be any divorce of reality and value in the emergent and epige- 
netic views. In fact I think that S. Alexander and Lloyd 
Morgan have done philosophy a real service in introducing the 
word emergence to designate the relation in which spiritual 
values stand to the organization of material elements. 

A glance at the footnotes in the chapters which follow will 
show my indebtedness to many writers. It is a little difficult 
to single out those to whom I am most indebted, but I am sure 
that I owe much to Professors John Dewey, 8. Alexander, Ed- 
ward Gleason Spaulding, and Ralph Barton Perry. We all 
owe so much to James that special acknowledgment is unneces- 
sary save by way of tribute; and I at least owe much to Bergson. 
I wish to thank Professor J. C. Manry for his painstaking read- 
ing of my manuscript and his wise suggestions, and Dr. H. 
Heath Bawden for his sometimes caustic criticisms, which I 
have found useful. I am much indebted also to Professor C. F. 
Taeusch for many suggestions and to Mr. H. J. Phillips for as- 
sistance in reading the proofs. J. Arthur Thomson has in- 
structed me with his science and comforted me with his philo- 
sophy. I have to thank Charles Scribner’s Sons for permission 
to print the quotation from Santayana facing the first page, 
and many other publishers for permission to quote from their 
books. 

G. T. W. P. 


CONTENTS 


PW BAT ISP AIOSORAY 1 iat uc Vine gibees a wed geetatel tc 
. PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 

. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 

. METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 

. SYNOPSIS OF SUBJECTS . 

. THE Cosmos 

. THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE . 

. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 

. Is roe WorLp PuRPOsIVE? 

. THE PROBLEM OF GOD . 

. PESSIMISM 

. THEORIES OF REALITY — DUALISM 

. THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM . 

. THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM . 

. THEORIES OF REALITY — PLURALISM 

: THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL — HISTORICAL . 

. THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL — RECONSTRUCTIVE 
MEVLIND AND DODY sos Gt hel) venture 

. FREEDOM 

. THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE . 

. PRAGMATISM 

. THe HicgHER VALUES oF Lirzr — Mora VALugs 


. THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE — ASTHETIC VALUES 


Une re UPD YA SY CoO ea a a 


O world, thou choosest not the better part! 

It is not wisdom to be only wise, 

And on the inward vision close the eyes, 

But it ts wisdom to believe the heart. 

Columbus found a world, and had no chart, 

Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; 

To trust the soul’s invincible surmise 

Was all his science and his only art. 

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine 

That lights the pathway but one step ahead 

Across a void of mystery and dread. 

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine 

By which alone the mortal heart is led 

Unto the thinking of the thought divine. 
SANTAYANA 


INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


CHAPTER I 
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 


Preliminary definition 
_ TxoseE who enter for the first time upon the study of philoso- 
phy are often puzzled to know what it is all about. The other 
sciences leave no doubt as to their subject-matter. Astronomy 
is about the stars; geology is about the rocks; botany is about the 
plants; psychology is about the mind. But what is philosophy 
about? It does not seem to have for its theme a perfectly defi- 
nite group of facts. So at first one feels somewhat lost in this 
subject and wishes that it could be explained quite clearly just 
what philosophy is. 

Let us see whether this very reasonable demand for a clear de- 
finition of philosophy can be satisfied. It is just possible that it 
may turn out to be an advantage that philosophy does not have 
a perfectly definite group of facts for its subject-matter, such as 
stars, rocks, plants, and mental processes. One gets tired some- 
times of studying facts, and longs for meanings and values. Who 
is there that has not at some time or other thrown down his text- 
book and found himself wondering — Oh! What’s the use? 
What’s the difference? What’s it allfor? What’s the value of 
it all? 

Now, philosophy has just this for its task — to try to answer 
these insistent and persistent questionings of the human mind, as 
to the use, meaning, purpose, and value of life. Philosophy has 
been defined as the cultural study of meanings and values, or still 
more concisely as the interpretation of life. Or, adopting the oft- 
quoted phrase of Matthew Arnold, we may say that Philosophy 
is the attempt to see life steadily and see it whole.1 In this telling 


1 Arnold said of the Greek tragic poet, Sophocles, that he saw life steadily and 
gaw it whole. 


Q2 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


phrase both the aim and the method of philosophy are given. 
The aim is to see life as a whole, not with the slant of the scien- 
tist or the business man or the clubman or the artist or poet or 
preacher or the university professor, nor with any slant at all; 
but to see it as it would be seen by “‘the spectator of all time and 
all existence’’; 1 and the method is to see it steadily, with neither 
prejudice nor bias nor half knowledge. 


A world view 

Again, philosophy has been defined as the attempt by use of scien- 
tific methods to understand the world in which we live. 

This attempt to understand the world, to combine the results 
of the special sciences into some kind of consistent world view, has 
always been the aim of philosophy from the days of Thales, the 
first Greek philosopher, to the present. But just what do we 
mean by the world? Among the Greeks it meant the Cosmos, or, 
as we should say, the Universe; and philosophers of all ages have 
courageously set themselves to this tremendous task of getting a 
theory of the Universe, its extent and duration (space and time), 
its creator (God), its purpose, its primary stuff or material, its re- 
lation to man and to his soul and destiny. To this end labored 
Democritus and Plato and Aristotle and Saint Augustine and 
Bruno and Descartes and Spinoza and Kant and Hegel and Her- 
bert Spencer and others of the great “ philosophers,’’ and these 
immense world problems still haunt us and must be studied. 

But at the present time this astronomical meaning of ‘‘the 
world”’ is less in our thoughts. With our modern individualistic, 
humanistic, and romantic moods we turn more to immediate in- 
terests, and ‘“‘the world’”’ means something else to us. With our 
northern climate, our indoor living, our big cities, our crowded 
populations, and our social life, the world we live in is not an as- 
tronomical world; it is rather a social, political, literary, moral, 
and religious world. 

The ancient Greeks were much troubled by the problem of per- 


1Plato said that the philosopher is the spectator of all time and all existence, 
and that he is one who sets his affections on that which really exists. — The 
Republic, v1, p. 486. 


WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 3 


manence and change; but by change they meant physical change, 
the motion of material atoms and particles and the phenomena 
of growth and decay. These questions are still unanswered; but 
our interests now are with another kind of changing world — 
changing social customs, changing political relations, changing 
morals, changing religion, and changing literary standards. But 
this kind of ‘‘world”’ is quite as much in need of interpretation as 
the other — and so philosophy remains with us; only now it be- 
comes the interpretation of I¢fe, its value and meaning, its source 
_andits destiny. Hence, evolution, progress, knowledge, the ways 
of the mind, problems of conduct and society have come into the 
foreground; but it is as true as ever that philosophy is an attempt 
to understand the world we live in. 

Despite the rather strenuous life that we lead now, busied as 
most of us are with athletics and social activities, with books and 
magazines, with college routine, with recreations and amuse- 
ments, I believe that we are more thoughtful and inwardly seri- 
ous than in former times; and that the philosophic impulse dawns 
earlier in our lives. Old philosophies and established traditions 
are no longer received without question. The spirit of fresh in- 
quiry is everywhere; but the trouble is that, owing to our in- 
tensely social life, time is lacking for careful and persistent study 
of the life problems. In the study of philosophy we simply take 
time to think some of our problems through. 

Probably there are very few of us who have not seriously asked 
just such questions as these: Can we any longer hold a religious 
view of the world? Is there any God at all, or is there nothing 
but matter and energy? Whatis matter made of? Ismy mind, 
which is now thinking and wondering, something different from 
matter, or is it just a grouping of atoms or a function of my body? 
I am alive. What is life? Sometime I shall die. What is 
death, and is there any part of me which may survive it? To- 
morrow I shall do many things. Some of them will be right and 
some wrong. What is right and what is wrong? Allabout me I 
see men striving for money and fame and pleasure. Are these 
really the highest values, or are there other values that are higher 
and better, such as peace, simplicity, faith, love, work, the enjoy- 


A INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


ment of art, the pursuit of science? What is most worth while? 
I can ask all these questions. Isit possible to find an answer to 
them? What are the limits of knowledge? 

Again, objects of beauty surround us in nature and in art. 
Some of the buildings in our city or on our college campus are 
beautiful and some are ugly. Just what is beauty? What is it 
that we enjoy in classical music and what is it that we admire in 
the old masters, in the Gothic cathedrals, in the Greek temples? 
I admire the sunset, the moon seen through the clouds, the wild 
flowers, the autumn leaves. Would nature be beautiful if there 
were no eye to see it or no mind to appreciate it? I walk through 
the crowded city and see men striving and straining for wealth, 
position, power. Some of them are loudly declaiming against in- 
justice, and I long to know what justice is and why men struggle 
and strive. All these are philosophical problems. 

To ask these big questions, to reflect upon them, to study them 
in a scientific way and to try to answer them — this is philosophy. 
Or, as James said, philosophy is after all just ‘‘an unusually per- 
sistent effort to think clearly.” 


The search for unity 

Herbert Spencer defined philosophy as completely unified 
knowledge, contrasting it with science, which is partially unified 
knowledge. His notion was that philosophy tries to unite the 
several sciences into a unified system, just as each special science 
tries to unite the particular facts within its own field into a uni- 
fied system. This was a very ambitious conception of philoso- 
phy; we do not hope now to realize it. But it was defective in 
another way. It was formulated in the last century when our 
hopes were bright that the natural sciences, physics, biology, 
psychology, sociology, would solve the world riddle. These 
hopes have been somewhat disappointed. ‘There is an unex- 
plained residue — a romantic element in life, even an element of 
tragedy — which must be taken account of in any true philoso- 
phy. And, besides, philosophy is something far more than the 
unification of the special sciences; it must satisfy not only our 
scientific interests but our moral and religious needs, our long- | 


WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 5 


ings and aspirations; these too are facts, which any system of 
thought must consider. If we could take all these facts and 
think them together, that would be philosophy. 

Still again, philosophy has been defined as an attempt to gain 
unity in our thinking. ‘This definition seems to differ only in 
form from the others. A theory of the world as a whole, of life as 
a whole, a world view, introduces unity into our thinking at once. 
We are very often perplexed and disturbed by the different and 
conflicting views of life which we get from the several groups 
to which we belong. At home we get one view of life, at school 
perhaps another. What we learn at church seems, it may be, 
quite inconsistent with what we learn in our science classes; 
while in our high-school groups or our college fraternities we get 
still another view of life. Which one is the true one? Or does 
each of these views contain some element of truth? If so, how 
can these various aspects of truth be distinguished and brought 
together into a consistent whole? 

But young people are not the only ones who are worried and 
perplexed by the lack of unity. It is not, for instance, conducive 
to mental peace to be obliged to keep one’s science and religion in 
separate water-tight compartments, nor to have one code of 
ethics for Sunday and another for week days, nor one set of prin- 
ciples for politics and another for business. 


Wonder 

But we must not think that philosophy has its origin in any 
kind of doubt or despair, or even in perplexity. Doubts and 
perplexities there are a plenty — and I hope that the earnest and 
persistent study of philosophy will remove some of them — but 
the source of philosophy goes back of all doubt and all perplexity 
and has its origin in simple wonder. Plato said that philosophy 
begins in wonder. The Greeks were devoted to philosophy, but 
as compared with us they were naive and childlike in their out- 
look on the world, and free from disturbing doubts; but they were 
much given to wonder, and their wonder soon became serious 
and thoughtful. | 

Philosophy may, indeed, be defined as wonder which has turned 


6 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


to serious and reflective thought. A little girl stood looking out 
the window, very thoughtful. Presently she turned and said, 
‘‘Mother, what I don’t understand is how there came to be 
any world.” With this reflection she became a philosopher. 
Most children just take the world for granted; most men and 
women do also. Butsome children and some grown-ups are very 
thoughtful and reflective; they wonder what the world is, how it 
came to be, what it is made of, and what it isfor. When their 
wonder becomes serious and reflective inquiry, they are philoso- 
phers. 


Wisdom 

Finally, philosophy has been defined as wisdom. The word 
philosophy is from the Greek word, sophia, wisdom, and the verb 
philein, to love. It is just the love of wisdom. Socrates dis- 
claimed having wisdom, but said he had the love of it. But wis- 
dom is precisely what he seemed to his contemporaries to have; 
he is the typical wise man and the world philosopher. It might 
prove troublesome to try to explain just how wisdom differs from 
knowledge; we can feel the difference, but we cannot express it. 
Perhaps taste and appreciation are involved. Is philosophy 
something like intellectual good taste? And is intellectual good 
taste something which enables us to appraise rightly the various 
values which are offered to us so freely in this rich and wonderful 
modern world of ours? We have become pretty well convinced 
that neither wealth nor pleasure is the highest value; and we 
are trying to find out what the highest values are. Every one 
seems to be pursuing something — but why? We seem to need 
a key to this puzzle of the relative worth of things — work, play, 
amusement, study, eating, drinking, love-making, science, art, 
music, poetry, social service, politics, business, and all the rest. 


Metaphysics 

In recent years this humanistic aspect of philosophy, this at- 
tempt to interpret life, to see things in the large, to gain the right 
perspective, has been emphasized much more than the older 
metaphysical problems, such as the nature of reality, of God, and 


WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? q 


the world. In the philosophy of the present we hear a great 
deal about life and the self and evolution and the pragmatic val- 
ues. The theory of knowledge and quest of reality, while they 
still hold us captive, yet are surpassed in interest by the theory 
of values. So it comes about that the word Metaphysics is now 
less commonly used. When used, it is often quite synonymous 
with Philosophy. Strictly, however, Metaphysics is a narrower 
term applied to problems of the world, of reality, of God, of pur- 
pose, of causality, and of mind; while Philosophy is a broader 
term, including first, all these subjects; second, Epistemology, 
or the theory of knowledge; and, third, the so-called normative 
sciences, Logic, Ethics, and Atsthetics. 


Poetry and philosophy 

In this connection Perry’s distinction between the philosopher- 
poets and the poets who are not philosophers is illuminating.! 
This will help us still further to understand what philosophy is, 
especially in its newer aspects. Some of the great poets seek 
merely to describe life; others seek to interpret it. The latter are 
the philosopher-poets. One thinks of Lucretius, Omar Khay- 
yam, Dante, Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, and the Greek 
dramatists. Consider Aischylus, Sophocles, Euripides, or even 
Aristophanes, the comic poet. These men were dreadfully in 
earnest. They were moralists, thinkers, prophets, reflecting the 
national consciousness of their people. The prophet is a man 
who brings a message; and if the prophet is a poet, he is a philoso- 
pher-poet. Aischylus, for instance, depicts in majestic language 
the tempestuous power of fate against those who disregard the 
ancient laws of morals and religion. The immutable moral law 
and the fateful suffering of men constitute the burden of Sopho- 
cles’ exquisite dramas; while Aristophanes in comic vein upholds 
the old traditions of Greece. Lucretius in Rome wrote a long 
poem in hexameter verse to set forth a materialistic theory of the 
world and save men from the fear of the gods; he would still be 
celebrated as a philosopher, had he written only in prose. Omar 
Khayy4m in his exquisite quatrains presents a distinct philoso- 

1 Ralph Barton Perry, The Approach to Philosophy, chap. 1. 


8 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


phy of life. It is partly the felicitous form of his stanzas as trans- 
lated by Fitzgerald that makes Omar so popular; but it is partly 
his strange philosophy and his conclusions, so repugnant to our 
reason, so agreeable to our fancy. 


Into this Universe, and Why not knowing, 
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 

And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. 


Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who 
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through, 

Not one returns to tell us of the Road, 
Which to discover we must travel too. 


Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire 

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 

Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire? 


It is Dante, however, who is the supreme philosopher-poet. 
He tells us in the Divine Comedy of the very shape and substance 
of the universe, of the origin of man and his destiny, and of the 
beginning of evilandits cure. In the beautiful lines of the Para- 
diso we read that from the very heart of the universe there 
streams forth the dazzling brightness of divine love, whose pur- 
pose is the redemption of manfrom sin. Goethe also is a thinker 
and a philosopher. The redemption of man is likewise his theme; 
but it comes now from experience, not from sacrifice and obedi- 
ence. Wordsworth is burdened with ‘the heavy and the weary 
weight of all this unintelligible world,” and Browning, “the soul 
dissector,’’ comforts us with his belief in God and truth and love. 

The wonderful appeal of all these philosopher-poets reveals the 
eternal demand in the human heart for a solution of the riddle of 
the world. We have our lyric and our epic moods and our dra- 
matic and romantic moods, in which we delight in Sappho and 
Homer and Virgil and Horace and Shakespeare and Shelley and 
Keats and Byron and Swinburne; but perhaps over all prevail 
our philosophic moods, in which we turn to the philosopher-poets 
for light and consolation. 

It is significant, in illustrating the philosophical tendencies of 


WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 9 


the present time, to notice how even the drama has become philo- 
sophical. The modern dramatist wrestles with the problems of 
life. Ibsen is the fountain head of this new drama, in which the 
poet and painter have given place to the thinker and the teacher. 
Emancipation from outgrown and offensive traditions is Ibsen’s 
theme and the feelings which he awakens in the reader or specta- 
tor are not so much those of esthetic alo as of thought 
and protest. 

In the so-called problem plays, the author takes advantage of 
the prevailing philosophic mood to awaken interest in his play. 
Finally, in Bernard Shaw the esthetic attitude is reduced to its 
lowest limits and there is little left but a preachment. The fe- 
verish interest with which we read the plays of Ibsen and Shaw 
and Galsworthy and the Russian school of writers reveals the 
longing we feel to have our doubts settled and to penetrate life’s 
mysteries, even though we recognize that the beauty of poetry 
and the drama is somewhat dulled when they become too heavily 
laden with thought. But this philosophic tendency of poetry is 
one of the signs of the deep and prevailing interest in philoso- 


phy. 
Finally, President Hibben says in his comprehensive way: 


The problems of philosophy are, in fact, the problems of life, the burden 
and the mystery of existence, the origin and destiny of man, the relations 
which he sustains to the world of which he 1s a part, and to the unseen uni- 
verse which lies round about him. 


It was in the time of Socrates that the word philosophy first 
came into general use. With Plato and Aristotle the word as- 
sumed the more technical meaning of real knowledge, or know- 
ledge of ultimate reality, somewhat like the German word Wissen- 
schaft, or our own word science when used in its broader mean- 
ing. In later Greek times, among the Stoics and Epicureans, 
the word came to have a narrower meaning, as the guide of life. 
In periods of political turmoil or religious perplexity, such as 


1 John Grier Hibben, The Problems of Philosophy (Charles Scribner’s Sons), 
p. 3. 


10 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


those preceding the Christian era, men have little time or taste for 
pursuing deep philosophical speculations; but they need a philos- 
ophy as a guide of life and usually adopt some philosophical sys- 
tem which seems suited to this end. Philosophy thus becomes 
the art of living; to the Stoic the art of living wisely, to the Epi- 
curean the art of living happily. Even now the word is often 
used popularly in this sense, as when we speak of ‘‘a philosophic 
attitude,” or of taking anything, particularly any calamity, 
‘philosophically ’’; calm or fortitude is evidently what is meant. 
Philosophy in its true meaning, as wisdom and the search for 
truth, although it may very well lead to such calm and fortitude, 
should not be confused with this practical end. 

Another misconception of philosophy arises when we confuse 
it with applied science. Francis Bacon is sometimes ranked 
among the philosophers; but his conception of philosophy was 
wholly utilitarian. Bacon thought that the primary aim of 
knowledge is to enable us to gain power over nature to the end of 
human utility. Although many people still think of science in 
this way, as existing to minister to our technical interests in its 
many applications to arts and industries, it is doubtful whether 
any thoughtful person would so regard philosophy now. KRe- 
cently, however, the attempt has been made to reconstruct phi- 
losophy so that it shall find its sole justification in its contribu- 
tions to social welfare. In these days of social uncertainty a per- 
son’s interest in social welfare may become so absorbing that he 
would wish to see all knowledge, even philosophy, subordinated 
to that practical end. But no matter how strong our practical 
and social interests are, we have moments and hours when we 
thirst for knowledge for its own sake. We wonder about God, 
the soul, and the world; we even wonder whether knowledge it- 
self is possible. This wonder when it issues in serious and reflec- 
tive thought is philosophy. William James, whose name will 
appear so often in the following pages, because he did so much 
to turn philosophy away from barren metaphysical discussions 
to richer human interests, said in a letter written at the age 
of twenty-three, “I am going to study philosophy all my 
days.” 


WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? 11 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Ralph Barton Perry, The Approach to Philosophy (Charles Scribner’s 
Sons), chaps. I, 11. 


Further references: 
William James, “Philosophy and Its Critics,’’ Some Problems of Philoso- 
phy (Longmans, Green and Company), chap. 1. Also in Everyman’s 
Library, Selected Papers in Philosophy. 


‘C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (Harcourt, Brace and Company). Intro- 
duction. 


W. P. Montague, “Philosophy in the College Course,” The Educational 
Review, December, 1910. 


William Adams Brown, ‘“‘The Future of Philosophy as a University 
Study,” Journ. of Phil., xvi11, pp. 673-82. 


Sarah Unna, ‘A Conception of Philosophy,” Journ. of Phil., xvmt, pp. 
29-41. 


Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (The Mac- 
millan Company), chap. I. 


GENERAL REFERENCES IN PHILOSOPHY 


Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, three volumes. (The 
Macmillan Company.) 

Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Frank Thilly. (Henry 
Holt and Company.) 

Russell, The Problems of Philosophy. (Home University Library, Henry 
Holt and Company.) 

Sidgwick, Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Marvin, An Introduction to Systematic Philosophy. (Columbia Univer- 
sity Press.) 

Thomson, Introduction to Science. (Henry Holt and Company.) 

Rogers, Student’s History of Philosophy. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Rand, Modern Classical Philosophers. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 
Source Book. | 

Windelband, A History of Philosophy. Translated by J. H. Tufts. (The 
Macmillan Company.) 

Rogers, English and American Philosophy Since 1800. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 

Pearson, The Grammar of Science. 3ded. (Adam and Charles Black.) 

Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

James, The Principles of Psychology, two volumes. (Henry Holt and Com- 
pany.) 

Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 

Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Bergson, Creative Evolution. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


12 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 

Everett, Moral Values. (Henry Holt and Company.) 

Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, two volumes. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 

Gomperz, Greek Thinkers. Translated by Magnus and Berry. 3 vols. 
(Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

Bakewell, Source Book in Ancient Philosophy. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

Aliotta, The Idealistic Reaction Against Science. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 

Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies. (Longmans, Green and Com- 
pany.) 

Kucken, The Problem of Human Life. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

Boodin, A Realistic Universe. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Adams, Idealism and the Modern Age. (Yale University Press.) 

Spaulding, The New Rationalism. (Henry Holt and Company.) 

Santayana, The Life of Reason, five volumes. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

Wenley, Kant and His Philosophical Revolution. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

Watson, The Philosophy of Kant. (Selections.) (The Macmillan Company.) 

Bowne, Personalism. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 

Morgan, Emergent Evolution. (Henry Holt and Company.) 

James, Varieties of Religious Experience. (Longmans, Green and Company.) 

Plato, Dialogues. Jowett’s translation. (Oxford University Press.) The 
Republic is translated in a small volume in the Golden Treasury Series. 
(The Macmillan Company.) Also, in the same series, one volume, en- 
titled The Trial and Death of Socrates, contains translations of the 
Euthyphron, Apology, Crito, and Phedo. 

Descartes, Discourse on Method. Also his Meditations. 

Locke, Essay Concerning the Human Understanding. 

Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge. 

Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, or his more simple Enquiry Concerning 
Human Understanding. 


Philosophical Journals, English and American. 

The Journal of Philosophy. Formerly The Journal of Philosophy, Psychol- 
ogy, and Scientific Methods. Ed. by Frederick J. E. Woodbridge and 
Wendell T. Bush, Columbia University. Fortnightly. 

The International Journal of Ethics. A Quarterly devoted to the Ad- 
vancement of Ethical Knowledge and Practice. Ed. by James H. Tufts, 
The University of Chicago. 

The Philosophical Review. Ed. by J. E. Creighton, Ithaca, New York. 
Bi-monthly. 

The Monist. A Quarterly Magazine devoted to the Philosophy of Sci- 
ence. (The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.) 

Mind. A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. Ed. by 
G. E. Moore. (The Macmillan Company, London and New York.) 
The Hibbert Journal. A Quarterly Review of Religion, Theology, and 
Philosophy. Ed. by L. P. Jacks. Williams and Norgate, London. 
The Personalist. A Quarterly Journal of Philosophy, Theology, and 
Literature. Ed. by Ralph Tyler Flewelling, The University of South- 

ern California, Los Angeles. 


CHAPTER II 
PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 


BETWEEN science and philosophy the very closest relationship 
exists. They spring from the same root, the love of knowledge; 
and they aspire to the same end, the knowledge of reality. The 
day has gone by when metaphysical “systems” can be con- 
structed independently of the physical sciences. 

So intimate is the relation between science and philosophy 
that some knowledge of the special sciences, especially of the 
more generalized branches, such as mathematics, physics, chem- 
istry, biology, and psychology, is indispensable to the student of 
philosophy. The ever-widening fields of these sciences make it 
more and more difficult for the philosopher to be in mastery of 
them. ‘This is conducive to a healthy humility. Ready-made 
systems constructed without due regard to the results of observa- 
‘ tion and experiment are held in less and less respect. Therefore 
philosophy is at the present time tending rather in the direction 
of the critical analysis of concepts and the study of meanings and 
values — in a word, to logical and humanistic studies. Never- 
theless, the ideal philosopher must be master of all the special 
sciences. 


What is science? 

The word science comes from the Latin word for knowledge 
and is derived from our old familiar friend in the First Latin 
Book, scio, scire. Science is knowledge. But there are different 
kinds of knowledge, and by scientific knowledge we mean that 
which is certain, exact, and fully organized: real knowledge, well 
organized, is scientific knowledge. 

Since philosophy, too, seeks a knowledge of the world, the two 
subjects would seem to have the same aim; yet there is a differ- 
ence. Sometimes it has been said that science describes while 
philosophy interprets. Mr. J. Arthur Thomson, whose little 


14 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


book entitled An Introduction to Science is recommended to the 
reader, following Pearson and many other modern scholars, 
defines science in this way: 


Science is the complete and consistent description of the facts of experi- 
ence in the simplest possible terms. 


The scientist in his study of any group of phenomena first col- 
lects his facts, analyzes and classifies them, studies the conditions 
under which they occur (that is, their causes), ascertains their 
uniform modes of behavior (that is, their laws), and sets all of 
this down in the form of a systematic treatise. Here his work 
ends. 

Now, of course it 7s a kind of explanation of a thing to show 
the conditions under which it occurs — that is, its causes — as 
when we explain typhoid fever by calling attention to the invari- 
able presence of a certain kind of bacillus; and it 7s a kind of ex- 
planation of a thing to show that it is an instance of a general 
uniformity or law, as when we show that a pendulum, constantly 
falling to its lowest point, is an instance of the general law of 
gravitation, all natural bodies, like the pendulum and the earth, 
tending to move toward each other. But still it is true that 
science really attempts no ultimate explanation of things, only 
analyzes and classifies them, determines the conditions under 
which they occur and formulates their modes of behavior. - 

The work of science, then, is as follows: ! 

I. The acquisition of facts 

II. The description of facts 
1. Definition and general description 
2. Analysis 
3. Classification 

III. Explanation of facts 

1. Ascertaining causes (invariable antecedents) 
2. Formulation of laws (uniformities of behavior) 


Philosophy and science 
Now, philosophy is like science in seeking knowledge which is 
certain, exact, and well organized. But it is not satisfied with 
1 Compare Jared Sparks Moore, The Foundations of Psychology, p. 97. 


PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 15 


this; it seeks knowledge which is also comprehensive. The human 
mind is not content merely to determine the invariable sequences 
of phenomena and to formulate their manner of behavior. It 
craves some ultimate explanation of things — their first cause, 
their moving cause, their purpose, their meaning, their value. 
It is this attempt to znterpret' the world, then, which is one of the 
tasks of philosophy; while science classifies, formulates, and de- 
scribes. The object of philosophy is, as Mr. Broad says, to take 
over the results of the various sciences, to add to them the results of 
the religious and ethical experiences of mankind, and then to reflect 
upon the whole. The hope is that, by this means, we may be able to 
reach some general conclusions as to the nature of the Universe, and 
as to our position and prospects in it.} 

It is no doubt this ambitious enterprise, this hope to get a syn- 
optic view of the work of the special sciences, and then to find 
some meaning in the whole that has in the past led to the un- 
favorable criticism of philosophy by scientists. But of course 
neither the attempt to gain a synoptic view of the whole nor the 
attempt to interpret its meaning could be in itself an occasion for 
criticism; for the human mind has a primary interest in both 
these things, and any object of human interest whatever is a le- 
gitimate subjectfor scientific inquiry, provided scientific methods 
are used. The critical attitude could only arise from the use of 
wrong methods in the work, or from the alleged hopelessness of 
the undertaking. The latter criticism would be a very weak one, 
and could have been made at any stage of the progress of thought 
against the possibility of the achievements of science itself. As 
regards method, it is of course true that in the past logical meth- 
ods have not always been used in the study of philosophy, just as 
they have not in science. 

Let us defer till a later chapter the question of method and get 
well fixed in our minds the subject-matter of philosophy. I 
think we may say that it has two distinct tasks, both of which 
differ from the work of science, and both of which are clearly 
legitimate fields of human thought. The first, then, is the con- 


1C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1923), 
p. 20. The original not italicized. 


16 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


scious reflection upon the world as a whole, particularly as to its 
meaning, purpose, and value. The second is the critical exami- 
nation of the concepts made use of both by science and common 
sense. The first has been called speculative philosophy, the 
second, critical philosophy.? 

As regards the first of these two fields, let us notice again that 
it is one of the profound cravings of the human mind to get just 
this synoptic view of life which philosophy attempts. It is not 
merely a quantitative view of the world that we desire, its mathe- 
matical relationships, its predictability; we want and We must 
have some St i, or at least some theory, of its ‘intrinsic 
qualitative character.”’ 


Science to-day is quantitative rather than qualitative. It expresses 
the relationship of the intensities of two phenomena — as, for example, 
the intensities of the electric current and of the illumination of an in- 
candescent lamp — and compensates for its inability to answer the 
question “how” by its wealth of data as to ““how much.” Research 
monograph and textbook alike emphasize the observable quantitative 
relationship and rarely venture far into the speculative hinterland 
where ‘Show’ must precede “how much.”’ As we teach science to-day 
in our schools the effort of learning the quantitative relationships too 
frequently leaves neither the instructor nor the student leisure for fruit- 
ful inquiry or speculation as to the mechanism itself.? 


It is not the purpose of science to study meanings, values, and 
appreciations, and so from the scientific point of view this rigid 
limitation is not a defect. But since our primary interests re- 
late to meanings and values, science must be supplemented by 
philosophy. My new motor car, for instance, is a thing of 
beauty, and it gives me joy just to contemplate its curves and its 
gloss and its correct proportions. It will have great value for me, 
as [ imagine, enabling me to keep distant appointments, to econ- 
omize time, to live more in the open air, to keep my family enter- 
tained, to maintain or increase my social prestige. It will havea 
meaning to my neighbors, revealing my unsuspected wealth and 


1 Compare C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (Harcourt, Brace and Company), 
Introduction. In a later chapter we shall see what is meant by the word ‘‘spec- 
ulative.”’ 

2John Mills, Within the Atom (D. Van Nostrand Co.), p. xi. 


PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 17 


my taste and discrimination. The merely scientific aspects of 
the car, its physical causes and the laws of dynamics involved, are 
of less interest to most people; the values and meanings are the 
interesting things. 

There is, to be sure, a science — namely, economics — which 
studies value. But the notion of economic value as a quality of 
objects by virtue of which they satisfy human wants or desires 
is not adequate for philosophy; for we immediately ask what 
causes the wants and desires; and whether really valuable things 
are those that satisfy wants or needs. And might it not be pos- 
sible that values determine wants, rather than wants values? 
Do we desire things because they are good or are they good 
because we desire them? 

Hence it becomes necessary to go beyond science to philoso- 
phy. Life must be interpreted, not merely described. It must 
be seen as a whole, not broken into separate parts. Its mean- 
ing and value must be sought, its purpose inquired into. Per- 
haps it has no purpose, meaning, or value; but such a conclusion 
could be reached only after reflective inquiry, and such reflective in- 
quiry would be philosophy. 


The critical analysis of concepts 

The second task of philosophy, referred to above — namely, 
the critical examination of concepts — should now be explained 
more fully. We mention this as the second task because it is 
second in point of interest. In logical order it should be first. 

All the sciences use certain concepts and make certain assump- 
tions which require critical examination. There is need of some 
general science, such as philosophy, to undertake a critique of 
these concepts and their assumptions and carry the examination 
of them farther than the special sciences find necessary for their 
purpose. As examples may be mentioned such concepts as law 
— that is, natural law — cause, space, time, matter, mind, energy, 
order, individuality, quality, quantity, series; or, extending the 
range of thought a little further, such concepts as truth, purpose, 
knowledge, God, evil, happiness. Now, philosophy undertakes 
the critical examination of these concepts and assumptions. 


18 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Cause 

Let us illustrate these limitations, which inhere in the very na- 
ture of science, by reference to two concepts, namely, cause and 
law. All the sciences are very much engaged in the ascertaining 
of causes, for, if causes are understood, the forces of nature can 
be controlled and the future predicted. So the scientist seeks for 
the cause of crystallization, of rust, of the souring of milk, of poor 
crops, of malaria and typhoid fever and cancer, of business de- 
pression and good times, of strikes, of war. In daily life we are 
all in search of causes: the cause, for instance, of the defeat of our 
football team, of the success of our neighbor’s son, of the fading 
of our complexion, of our falling hair, of the leaking of our refrig- 
erator. | 

But now what 7s a cause? What is causality? Here, then, is 
a philosophical problem; for science, although largely engaged in 
the search for causes, is not concerned with the metaphysics of 
causation. Of course science has to have a working basis for the 
determination of causes, and it has a very simple rule. A cause 
is an invariable antecedent. If we are seeking the cause of a cer- 
tain thing, say typhoid fever, and invariably find a certain bacil- 
lus present, this is called the cause of the phenomenon. Armed 
with this conception of cause as mere sequence, and with the as- 
sumption of the Uniformity of Nature, the scientist is In posses- 
sion of all that he needs to control phenomena and predict the 
future. Armed with the simple knowledge of sequence, he can 
go on to prevent typhoid fever, to avert the failure of crops, to 
secure good health, and the success of his children. 

But still we do not know what a cause really is. There must 
be, so it seems to us, something more in causality than mere 
sequence in time; there must be some inner connection between 
cause and effect. This connection philosophy seeks. 

The untrained mind looks upon the relation between cause and 
effect as if the cause produces the effect. ‘The cause is a kind of 
agent; it does something to the effect; there is a process of enforce- 
ment between the cause and the effect. In the case of mechani- 
cal causes, it is very hard for us to believe that this is not true, 
and it would be very hard to prove that there is not something 


PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 19 


like mechanical necessity uniting the effect with the cause; but 
science knows nothing of any such necessary connection and 
philosophy hesitates to affirm it, for, as Hume pointed out, the 
only necessity in the case may be a necessity of thought. We 
know nothing of objective necessity, and the conception of cause 
as an agent, which does something to the effect, no doubt is a kind 
of analogy carried over to nature from our own experience as 
agents. When I put forth effort and use strength in overcoming 
obstacles, as in moving physical objects, there is a feeling of 
enforcement, a feeling of myself as an agent effecting changes. 
When we do things or suffer things done to us, there is the feeling 
of power or force; and so, when we see things happening in nature, 
_ we carry over this inner experience of effort, or agency, which we 
think causes things to happen in our own lives, and assume that 
causation in general is just such a case of power or enforcement. 
This is called an animistic or anthropomorphic explanation of 
causation, explaining things in nature by our own feelings and 
experiences. And it is wholly unnecessary for science to make 
assumptions of this kind, since its ends may be fully served 
merely by the observation of uniformities as seen in the mere 
routine of experience. There is regularity and uniformity in the 
happenings. 

But after all this has been explained to us, we still believe that 
there must be some other connection or relation between events 
than mere routine, and so philosophy, going beyond science, has 
attempted various theories of causation which shall explain this 
relation. Perhaps the world is a timeless process in which the 
principle of causality is reducible to the principle of logical 
ground. Perhaps the world is an organism in which every part 
is in sympathetic vibration with every other part. Perhaps the 
world is a dynamic unity in which there is interaction among 
all the parts. Perhaps there are no separate bonds uniting 
individual things, God being the bond that unites all things in 
himself. Perhaps all individual things are parts of one unitary 
being, giving apparent order and connection between things, the 
unity in things being that kind of unity called personality. Per- 
haps — and this may be the most profound interpretation of all 


20 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


— cause is really just what in popular thought it is supposed to 
be, namely, productive activity, creative power, and perhaps the 
scientific use of the word cause, as a mere antecedent in time, 
points to cause as just a sign useful in the prediction of events. 

Whatever the truth may be as to the inner connection of 
things, nowhere are the limitations of science felt more keenly 
than in the discovery of the real nature of causality. No in- 
quiring mind can be permanently satisfied with the scientific 
treatment of causality as mere sequence.! 


First cause 

Again, since science rests quite content in the belief that every 
event has a cause and finds the assumption fully justified by its 
fruits, the student of philosophy will insist upon inquiring about 
the first cause. Going back over an infinite series from effect to 
cause, and then to another cause, does not satisfy his demand for 
some kind of a whole or completed system. So we say naively 
that in the beginning God created the world, and thus complete 
the picture, only to introduce other perplexities which we long to 
solve. 

Furthermore, we may ask — Anyway, is it quite certain that 
every event has a cause? May it not be that things just happen 
without any cause? And, furthermore, am not I myself daily, 
perhaps hourly, conscious of acts of freedom, in which my choice 
is not determined by any antecedent event? 


Final cause 

But still another aspect of the cause problem shows the limita- 
tions of science and the need of philosophy. What shall we say 
of final causes? The expression final cause was used by Aristotle 
in a special sense. The word final here does not refer to any first 
or last cause, but to the end or purpose of an action, like the 


1 For a discussion of the problem of causality see: 
Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, bk. 1, part m1. 
Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, 3d ed. part 1, chap. Iv. 
John Stuart Mill, Logic, bk. 111, chaps. 111, Iv, V, XXI, XXII. 
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics, vol. 1, chap. LY. 
W. T. Marvin, A First Book of Metaphysics, chap. X1. 


PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 2) 


Latin, fints. In human affairs the end or purpose of an action, 
or a product of action, is spoken of as a cause, as when the obser- 
vation of an anticipated eclipse of the sun is the cause of setting 
up a telescope in a certain place. So the question arises whether 
in nature, quite outside human affairs, there are ends to be 
gained which may be regarded in any way as determining all 
structures or processes; that is, whether final as well as efficient 
causes exist in nature. Science is not concerned with final 
causes, but the student wonders, nevertheless, whether things in 
nature are not in some way determined by ends to be attained. 


Laws of nature 
_ Next consider another fundamental notion in science, that of 
law. What is a law of nature? Science is very largely engaged 
in finding out these laws and formulating them, such, for in- 
stance, as the laws of chemical valence, or the laws of thermo- 
dynamics, or the laws of falling bodies. We speak of things obey- 
ang the laws of nature and of the world as being governed by nat- 
ural laws. There is much confusion here in the popular mind, 
and the student should understand just what a law is in science, 
and what the limitations of the scientific view are. The word 
law is used in two wholly different senses, and it would be better 
if we had two words for the two ideas. In morals and in juris- 
prudence a law is a command, or rule, or injunction, which some 
authority imposes upon intelligent beings and which they are 
supposed to obey. In science the word has no such meaning; 
it means an observed uniformity in the behavior of things. 
Strictly a law of nature is a mere formula, or shorthand expres- 
sion, for certain observed uniformities of behavior in natural ob- 
jects. It is, as Pearson says, the résumé or brief expression of 
the relationships and sequences of certain groups of perceptions 
and conceptions, and exists only when formulated by man.? 

So we see that laws of nature are not forces nor powers nor 
commands at all. They are nothing but shorthand statements 
of certain uniformities in the behavior of things. Therefore, the 
universe is not ‘‘governed”’ by the laws of nature; neither do 


1 Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, 3d ed., part I, p. 82. 


22 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


things “‘obey”’ these laws. We shall have to look elsewhere for 
the government of the world, for laws of nature are impotent. 

Thus it is that science does not explain why things act as they 
do, only how they act; what their habit of acting is. When we 
study the behavior of atoms in their chemical combinations we 
find that they behave in very definite ways, but we do not know 
why they behave so. They seem to have what we used to call 
affinities for one another, so that, for instance, two atoms of hy- 
drogen combine with one atom of oxygen to form a molecule of 
water. But the word affinity seems to point to a theory drawn 
from human analogy and probably no chemist would counte- 
nance sucha theory. He is content merely to record observed 
uniformities. 

The law of gravitation first formulated by Newton does not 
explain why bodies gravitate toward one another, but only how 
they do so. The law says that “every particle of matter in the 
universe attracts every other particle with a force directly as 
their masses, and inversely as the square of the distance which 
separates them.’”! It occurred to Newton, watching the fall of 
an apple, as it is said, that all bodies throughout the universe — 
such, for instance, as the earth and the moon — tend to move to- 
ward one another, just as the apple tends to move toward the 
earth. ‘The law expresses the manner of their movement, but it 
says nothing about the cause. Newton did not know why bodies 
move together, nor does any one know now. Even the word aft- 
tract has a technical sense as it occurs in the law, for it is not im- 
plied that there is any “attraction” in the human sense between 
material bodies. They may be driven together; or, as Einstein 
thinks, their behavior may be due, not to any force acting be- 
tween the bodies or upon them, but to the nature of space. 

We see, therefore, that from the point of view of science, a law of 
nature is not only not a force or power, but that it tells us nothing 
as to the nature of the forces that are at work or even whether 
there are any forces. But the mind of man is so constituted that 
he longs to know not merely how things act, but why they do so. 
Hence the need of supplementing science by philosophy. 


1Simon Newcomb, Popular Astronomy, 6th ed., revised, p. 81. 


PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 23 


Before we leave the subject of law, there is another question 
that may come up. Even granting that a law tells us nothing 
about the forces which make things go and behave as they do, is 
it quite true to say that a law of nature is nothing but a formula- 
tion of an observed uniformity, and further that it is man-made, 
and has no existence until formulated by man? Pearson, as we 
have seen, makes this statement. So it would appear that 
Newton did not discover the law of gravitation, but created it. 
Surely, you say, the heavenly bodies behaved precisely in this 
manner before Newton observed them or indeed before any man 
ever existed. Well, while Pearson might make a logical defense 
of his position claiming that the law zs the formulation of uni- 
formities which are observed and hence imply an observer, and 
that in nature there are only certain sequences and relations, nev- 
ertheless there are many philosophers who would not agree with 
him wholly in this matter. 

There are many other positions which might be taken. One 
might say the laws of nature are decrees of God, and hence resem- 
ble human laws as we use the word in jurisprudence. Or, if this 
position seems too naive, one might say with Plato that laws are 
eternal realities, altogether transcending individual things, and 
that things behave according to the laws; or one might under- 
take a logical examination of the concept of law, tracing it back 
to the more general notion of the uniformity of nature, and that 
back to the still more general notion of Order, which latter con- 
cept is involved in the very notion of a universe or a cosmos. 

I have referred to two concepts, namely, that of law, and that 
of cause, which are constantly used in every science and which 
nevertheless are not defined by science in such a way as to satisfy 
the inquiring mind. The same is true of many other common 
terms used in science, such as space, time, energy, matter, mind. 
Thus it becomes apparent that some general science like philos- 
ophy or metaphysics is needed to examine these terms. 

1 For a clear treatment of the subject see Marie T. Collins, Some Modern Con- 
ceptions of Natural Law, and the profound discussion by Bernard Bosanquet in 
The Principle of Individuality and Value, as well as Josiah Royce’s essay on 


“The Principles of Logic” in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 
vol. 1, pp. 67-135. 


24 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Facts of experience 

There is one such term particularly in need of critical examina- 
tion and this is the term fact or fact of experience. 

If science is a complete and consistent description of the facts 
of experience, the question will arise, What is a fact of experi- 
ence? Of course science has to have some definition of a “‘fact.” 
It is usually defined as something immediately observed and not 
inferred, and the medium of observation is usually some of our 
organs of sense, such as the eye or ear or hand; but sometimes a 
fact may be something internally observed; for instance, a feeling 
oremotion. In general we may say that sense-data are the facts 
upon which science is built. 

But now the philosopher is not satisfied with this disposition of 
facts; he wishes to know much more about them. Are the facts 
of science, then, nothing but groups or bundles of sensations 
combined into percepts? I thought, the reader will say, that 
science had a firmer foundation. I thought that science was the 
one thing in the world that was built on solid objective realities, 
not on “‘sense-data.”’ If science is built on sense-data, on the 
perceptions of human beings, why, then its whole fabric is in 
a way subjective. I supposed that science tells us about ob- 
jective things as they really are, and as they were before ever 
man existed. 

But when we come to think of it, how is science going to get at 
these solid objective realities except through the sense organs of 
the scientist? So the problem arises, just what are these sense- 
data and how are they related to the real things of the world, or 
are they the real things? Thus we are forced into philosophy — 
into that particular branch of it called Epistemology, the science 
of knowledge. 

Thus in the end we see something of the relation of philosophy 
to science. ‘They have the same spirit and the same purpose — 
the honest and laborious search for truth. In this search for 
truth, science imposes upon itself a certain peculiar task and this 
task involves certain limitations. But the inquiring, wondering 
human mind chafes at these limitations and insists upon pene- 
trating into regions lying beyond the field of science — and thus 
philosophy arises. 


PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 25 


Applied science 

In thus revealing the close companionship of science and phi- 
losophy, I have been using the word ‘‘science”’ in its broader and 
more dignified sense, as a certain kind of knowledge; namely, 
that which is exact, certain, and fully organized. It is hardly 
necessary to add that this is not the popular idea of science, 
which is apt to emphasize its practical side. Sometimes we 
think of science as a kind of wizard that is going to fight the next 
war. It is something of almost uncanny power, personified in 
our Edisons and Burbanks. It suggests mastery of the forces of 
nature. It is something which wrests from Nature her secrets 
in order to use them for practical ends. We immure ourselves in 
- our laboratories and dig out the gold of science in order that we 
may exchange it for happiness in the form of labor-saving and 
time-saving devices, means of rapid transportation over land or 
water or through the air or instantaneous communication by the 
ether waves, cinematographic devices to afford us amusement and 
instruction, and subtle inventions of every sort to provide us 
with comforts and conveniences. Or science is conceived as a 
powerful ally of man, to which we may turn in time of want to 
learn how to increase the fertility of our soils, or in time of war to 
provide us with instruments for annihilating our enemies, or in 
time of sickness to discover X-rays to diagnose our diseases, or 
antitoxins to prevent them, or serums to cure them. 

In other words, science to many people is just an wnstrument to 
be applied to increasing man’s power over nature, not something 
intrinsically good in itself. It is applied science which they have 
in mind. It is interesting to know, however, that the great dis- 
coveries in science, even those which have led to these practical 
applications which are prized so highly, have usually been made 
by those who had no immediate interest in the practical applica- 
tions, but were actuated purely by their scientific interest, by the 
love of knowledge for its own sake. It is, of course, this theoreti- 
cal science which is so closely related to philosophy. And-even 
the most practical people, those who are always thinking of the 
practical applications of knowledge, are not always in a “‘practi- 
cal” mood.. Sometimes we all thirst for knowledge for its own 


26 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


sake. Then we turn to science in the broader sense, as love of ex- 
act knowledge. Sometimes we are in a mood of wonder, musing 
whether the whole world has any meaning, purpose, or value. 
Then we turn to philosophy. Or, perhaps, we are in a mood of 
doubt or even of despair, oppressed by the weight of our perplex- 
ities and cares — and then we turn to religion. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
J. Arthur Thomson, Introduction to Science (Home University Library, 
Henry Holt and Company), chaps. 1, 0, v. 


Further references: 

Ralph Barton Perry, The Approach to Philosophy (Charles Scribner’s 
Sons), chap.v. Present Philosophical Tendencies (Longmans, Green 
and Company), chaps. I, v. 

Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance (Houghton 
Mifflin Company), chap. xIv. 

James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism (The Macmillan Company), 
part 1, lectures 2-5. (The classical discussion of recent years on the 
meaning of law.) 

Ernst Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures (The Open Court Publishing 
Company), translated by T. J. McCormack. The Science of Mechan- 
ics. (The Open Court Publishing Company.) English translation, 
pp. 481-504. 

C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought. (Harcourt, Brace and Company.) 

L. T. More, The Limitations of Science. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, 3d ed. (Adam and Charles 
Black), chaps. I-v. 


T. H. Huxley, Methods and Results (D. Appleton and Company), 
chaps. 1, 11. ) 


CHAPTER III 
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 


How are philosophy and religion related? 

TuHE relationship between philosophy and religion is very in- 
timate, but is of a different kind from that between philosophy 
and science. Philosophy tries to gain a more unified and com- 
plete understanding of the world than does science, but religion 
attempts a still more perfect unity. While philosophy tries to 
get some unifying conception of the world which shall enable us 
to grasp its meaning in our thought, religion attempts nothing 
less than the securing of an actual unity or harmony between the 
individual and the world. In religion we attempt to adjust our- 
selves to the world, or the world to ourselves. It is not con- 
cerned so much with the knowledge of God, for instance, as it is 
with the gaining of God’s favor, or the coming into friendly and 
harmonious relations with him. 

Of course, a developed religion cannot operate without some 
conceptions of the world; but the center of religious interest is 
not in the conceptions as modes of knowledge. Thus a theistic 
religion posits a certain degree of knowledge of God; but the cen- 
ter of interest in it will be gaining the favor of God as thus 
known, or coming into friendly and harmonious relations with 
him. 

Professor Ladd wrote an essay entitled, “Is the Universe 
Friendly?” ! This is evidently a religious problem. ‘To make 
the universe friendly is one of the aims of religion. Primitive 
_man believed himself surrounded by hostile forces which he 
could not control — the sun and the sea, winds and tempests, 
lightning and pestilence. By means of offerings, sacrifices, and 
prayers, he hoped to render all these forces friendly. Under the 
influence of religion, the world became peopled with kindly and 


1George T. Ladd, ‘‘Is the Universe Friendly?’ Hibbert Journal, vol. 10, 
pp. 328-43. 


28 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


beneficent spirits, standing in sympathetic relation with man, 
commanding awe and reverence and worship and obedience, yet 
protecting and befriending him. So it was in ancient India with 
Indra and Varuna and Soma. So in ancient Greece with Zeus 
and Poseidon and Apollo and Athena. So among the Hebrews 
with Jehovah. 

It has been said that the function of religion is to make man 
feel at home in the world. But philosophy and science also make 
us feel at home in the world, by widening our knowledge and giv- 
ing us the keen joy of comprehension; while religion does this ina 
more direct and human manner by introducing a personal rela- 
tion between man and the powers of the Universe. Science, phi- 
losophy, and religion are all alike in this, that their aim is to un- 
derstand the world; but the purpose of the understanding is dif- 
ferent ineach. In science the purpose is frequently pure theory, 
or knowledge for its own sake, but more commonly it is know- 
ledge subordinated to practical economic ends. In philosophy 
the purpose is the love of wisdom and the resulting mental peace 
and satisfaction. In religion the purpose is peace, harmony, ad- 
justment, salvation. Philosophy and religion thus deal often 
with the same ideas, such as the soul, its origin and destiny, God 
and creation; but the interests are different in the two fields. In 
the former, they are theoretical and intellectual; in the latter, 
emotional and personal — practical in a sense different from the 
practicality of applied science. 


What is religion? 

If any one who has not reflected much about such things 
should be asked what religion is, he might find it difficult to say. 
Perhaps he would take refuge in the remark that all definitions 
are unsatisfactory, and that religion especially is something 
which must be experienced, not defined. This is true, but never- 
theless the word religion means something and it is well to know 
what it means. 

When we think of religion, probably a group of things will 
come to mind, such as churches, prayers, sermons, songs, collec- 
tions, creeds, and rituals, and a lot of people sitting quictly to- 


PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 29 


gether. But evidently these things are not religion. If we study 
all the religions of the world, ancient and modern, and try to ab- 
stract the elements common to all, we should arrive at some kind 
of definition. Perhaps it would be something like this: 

‘Religion is a feeling of dependence upon the unseen powers 
which control our destiny, accompanied by a desire to come into 
friendly relations with them.” 

Religion is a belief in ‘‘a power not ourselves which makes for 
righteousness’’ and a desire to come into harmonious relations 
with that power. 

“Religion is the consciousness of our practical melatian to an 
invisible spiritual order.” 

Religion is the love of God. It is communion with the Over- 
soul. Itis loyalty to the highest within us. ‘I, the imperfect,’’ 
says Emerson, ‘‘adore my own perfect.”’ Thus religion is based 
- on a deep, instinctive feeling of higher values. It is the divinity 
within us reaching up to the divinity above. It is looking up 
very high to ultimate values.and being drawn to them by sym- 
pathy and recognition. ‘Ideas and feelings are religious,” says 
Wundt, “which refer to an ideal existence.’”? Thus the names, 
symbols, and persons of religion are sacred, holy, because 
they are supreme values transcending common things. Hence 
the religious attitude is one of loyalty, devotion, reverence, 
humility.! 


Spirituality 

In religious writings the word spirit, spiritual, spirituality, are 
ever present. Perhaps the student has been confused by these 
words. They suggest hazy, ghostly things, the existence of 
which he has come to doubt. But these words now have a defi- 
nite meaning neither ghostly nor mysterious. They refer to the 
things of highest worth. Spirit is nothing different from mind, 
but it is mind seen under the aspect of value. To be spiritual, 
says Santayana, is to live in the presence of the ideal. The 


1 On the definition of religion, see James B. Pratt, The Religious Conscious- 
ness, chap.1I. Pratt defines religion as the serious and social attitude toward the 
Determiner of Destiny. 


30 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


meaning of spirituality and its relation to religion are best ex- 
pressed by Drake in these words: 

This disposition of the heart and will, through which a man comes to 
care for the highest things and to live in gentleness and inward calm 
above the surface aspects and accidents of life, we call, in its inner 
nature, Spirituality; when it is embodied in outward forms and institu- 
tions, and spreads among whole communities, we call it a religion.? 


Thus religion loses its mysterious and dogmatic and oracular 
character and becomes the instinctive response of the soul in 
need. Itisnot something the “truth” of which we have to ques- 
tion and argue about and seek evidences for. It rests upon the 
recognition of a realm of higher values and a kind of instinctive 
sympathy with them and longing for them. Since the task of 
philosophy is to study the meanings and values of the world, we 
see how intimate is the relation between philosophy and religion. 


Influence of philosophy upon our religious beliefs 

One is often asked what effect the study of philosophy is likely 
to have upon our religious beliefs. I think it is sure to have a 
most wholesome effect. At first the study of philosophy may be 
disturbing, especially if one’s religious creed is rather narrow and 
uncompromising. But if it is broad and simple, philosophy will 
strengthen it. Such a creed, for instance, is given in the Chris- 
tian Bible: “‘ What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’’? 
This passage seems to get at the three fundamentals in religion: 
righteousness, sympathy or love, and humility or reverence. As 
Bacon said, “‘It is true that a little philosophy inclineth Man’s 
mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds 
about to religion.’’* Indeed, philosophy should help us to put our 
fundamental religious beliefs on a solid intellectual foundation 
and so relieve us of much perplexity and doubt. Sometimes our 
religious beliefs are held timidly and with trembling doubt. We 
have a subconscious dread lest “profane” science should come in 


1 Durant Drake, Problems of Religion (Houghton Mifflin Company), p. 244. 
2 Micah, v1, 8. 
3 The Essays of Lord Bacon, xvi, ‘‘Of Atheism.” 


PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 31 


and dissipate our beliefs. Philosophy takes us up into the 
mountain-top and allows us to look over into this valley of uncer- 
tainties. In this, as in many cases, knowledge banishes fear. 
Having seen the worst and found it not so very bad, thereafter 
there is greater peace. 


Ethics and religion 

Religion should not be confused with ethics, which is a 
normative science dealing with the standards of right con- 
duct; nor should it be confused with right conduct itself. Re- 
ligion is a powerful motive to righteousness, but it is more than 
righteousness. Its essential note is reverence and its peculiar 
- aim is harmony and adjustment; and harmony with the highest 
involves righteousness of conduct. History shows us how hard it 
is to compel men to do right, but in some great cause their ener- 
gies may all be enlisted and the best in them drawn out; it is love 
rather than fear that is really effective. The motive of loyalty 
makes the most powerful appeal to men. ‘The spirit of reli- 
gion,” says L. P. Jacks, “‘is that of uncompromising loyalty to 
the highest.” 


The comparative study of religions 

Nothing has done more to vitalize the interest in religion 
in recent times than the study of the history of religions. Some 
good book on this subject should be in the hands of every stu- 
dent, and he should become familiar with the religions of ancient 
India, of Greece and Rome, of Scandinavia, of the Mohammed- 
ans, of the ancient Hebrews, as well as with the history and 
meaning of Christianity. Common to all will be found the belief 
in unseen powers which rule the world and make for righteous- 
ness and a desire to come into harmonious relations with them, 
with perhaps always the feeling of unity and the certainty of 
response. | 


The social character of religion 
In recent literature on the origin and nature of religion, a liter- 
ature most extensive and vital, much emphasis has been put 


32 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


upon its social character. This movement is apparently a part 
of the general emphasis upon the social nature of man which 
characterizes this century. The nineteenth century called at- 
tention to the evolution of man and his relations to the lower 
animals. The twentieth century has the more attractive task of 
investigating his social nature and social relations. The study 
of religion from this point of view has thrown much new light 
on the whole subject.? 

It is pointed out by this modern school that religion is social in 
its origin, a kind of expression of group consciousness. Early 
religious rites and ceremonies were performed by or on behalf 
of the whole group, and an important function of early religions 
was evidently that of social control. Religion, in its real mean- 
ing, is the emotional expression of the collective spirit of the 
group and has its purpose in cementing the group into a closer 
and more effective union. The teaching of Jesus, representing 
religion in its most perfect form, is preéminently social, empha- 
sizing love, sympathy, codperation, and righteousness. Particu- 
larly at the present time we are living in a positive, scientific, and 
social age. Our religion, if it is to survive, must be positive, 
scientific, and social, having as its end the more perfect socializ- 
ing of humanity, emphasizing love and sacrifice and community 
of interest. Just now, as it is pointed out, with the massing and 
crowding of populations throughout the world, there is instant 
and imperative need of religion as a socializing power. To this 
end a reconstruction of religion is necessary, recognizing its social 
origins and the social needs of the present. 

With this emphasis upon the social value of religion, we must 
all be in fullsympathy. But it does not follow from this that it is 
to be defined as the conservation of social value, or as a valuing 
process, or as an effort to realize higher social values. As thus 
conceived, religion loses its very heart, which is the belief in su- 


1 Compare: 
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 
Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis; A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. 
Charles A. Ellwood, The Reconstruction of Religion. 
E. S. Ames, ‘‘ Religious Values and the Practical Absolute,’ Int. Journ. Ethics, 
vol. XXXII, no, 4. 
George Willis Cooke, The Social Evolution of Religion. 


PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 33 


perhuman forces and powers, in an unseen moral order which 
commands our loyalty and allegiance. In religion we look up to 
God, not around to our fellow men; and it is precisely this up- 
ward looking, this admiring contemplation of something above 
us, something supremely good and grand and pure, which gives 
religion its socializing power. Therefore any attempt to “re- 
construct” religion, making it merely a society whose purpose 
is social welfare, will shear it of its vitalizing force. 

I do not know whether this attempted reconstruction has 
come about through the notion that religion hitherto has rested 
upon the belief in the supernatural, and that science has de- 
stroyed our belief in the supernatural, and that it is therefore 
necessary to reconstruct our religion on a natural, that is, a 
merely human, basis. Science has, indeed, shaken our faith in 
the supernatural, but fortunately religion does not rest upon 
the retention of that term. The word supernatural gets its mean- 
ing from the connotation that may from time to time be ats 
tached to the simpler words nature and natural. If we think of 
nature as ‘whatever exists’? obviously we cannot believe at the 
same time that the supernatural exists. But anything which ex- 
ists of course continues to exist even if some of us call it natural 
and others call it supernatural. God isin nature. The power 
not ourselves which makes for righteousness is in nature; and it 
is just the faith in these powers — these unseen forces all about 
us, responsive to our inner longings and our profound needs — 
that gives religion its never-failing vitality. 


Humility and religion 

What is wanted is not a reconstruction of religion, but a re- 
vival of it, a revival not in the form of emotional upheavals or 
miraculous exhibitions, but in the form of a revering sense of the 
eternal values. If religion at the present time has lost any of its 
former glory, the cause is not difficult to see. The present age 
has placed its reliance upon certain new-found gods — science, 
invention, industrial and commercial progress, social reconstruc- 
tion, new forms of social organization, the new hygiene, labor 
unions, prohibition, votes for women, societies for the promotion 


34 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


of everything good and the prevention of everything evil, clubs, 
fraternal societies, and organizations of a thousand kinds. 

Just at present, our trust in these things, particularly our trust 
in science and its practical benefits and our trust in the new con- 
trol which we have gained over natural forces, is becoming less 
confident. There are many indications that these things are 
about to fail as a means of social regeneration. We hear of “‘civ- 
ilization at the crossroads” and “salvaging our civilization.” ! 
When doubts begin to assail our hitherto self-confident age, the 
outlook for religion becomes brighter. Religion does not flour- 
ish in a cock-sure, self-glorying era, such as that preceding the 
Great War. Something of humility is essential to the religious 
attitude. So long as the ever-advancing discoveries of science 
were being applied to lessen our discomforts and remove our 
fears and anxieties, we did not so much feel the need of religion. 
But when, as may happen, we make the discovery that our won- 
derful inventions, our wireless telegraphy, our radio conversa- 
tions, our warships and airships, as well as our countless organi- 
zations and uplift movements, are powerless to avert social 
disaster, and that our materialistic civilization has done little 
to promote the things of higher value, art, literature, morality, 
peace, and social stability, then perhaps the mood of religion 
will return. We shall need the fruit of the spirit, such as love, 
peace, kindness, faithfulness, temperance. 

At all events, we see that the relation between religion and 
philosophy is most intimate. If we define religion as the cultiva- 
tion of the spiritual values which are ever present, but sometimes 
dormant, in the human soul, it belongs to philosophy to scrutinize 
these values, determining their source and their objective equiv- 
alents. If, again, religion is the response of the soul to the divine 
forces of the universe, philosophy must tell us about these di- 
vine forces and whether any such exist. If, as one writer says, it 
is indispensable to the religious attitude to believe that somehow 
there lies behind things a power or essence that has something in 
common with our own nature, something that can without abuse 


1 See, for instance, the recent book by Edward M. East, Mankind at the Cross- 
,voads. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 


PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 35 


of language be called personal, then philosophy must determine 
whether there is in science or metaphysics anything to prevent 
our believing in such a personal power; and what, if any, reason 
there is in science or metaphysics for so believing. 

Perhaps then it will be discovered that the old conflict be- 
tween religion and science has disappeared with our better un- 
derstanding of what science really is and our fuller understand- 
ing of religion. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance. (Houghton 
Mifflin Company), chap. x11. 


Further references: 
W. K. Wright, A Student’s Philosophy of Religion. (The Macmillan Come 


pany.) 
Arthur C. McGiffert, The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas. (The Mac- 
millan Company.) 
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. (Longmans, Green 
and Company.) 
George R. Dodson, The Sympathy of Religions. (The Beacon Press.) 
Emile Boutroux, Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy. (The 
Macmillan Company.) 
Richard Cabot, What Men Live By. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 
Josiah Royce, Sources of Religious Insight. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 
Morris Jastrow, The Study of Religion. (Charles Scribner’s Sons. Con- 
temporary Science Series.) 


George Foot Moore, History of Religions, 2 vols. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 
The Birth and Growth of Religions. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 


G. A. Barton, The Religions of the World. (The University of Chicago 
Press.) 

Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Edwin D. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion. (Charles Scribner’s 
Sons. Contemporary Science Series.) 

James Bissett Pratt, The Religious Consciousness. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 

Harald Hoeffding, The Philosophy of Religion. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 


CHAPTER IV 
METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 


In the study of philosophy it is important to discuss the tech- 
nique or method to be followed. Preliminary even to this, per- 
haps, we ought to ask whether the problems of philosophy are of 
such a character that it is possible to answer them, or worth 
while to try to do so. 

In this chapter, then, suppose we discuss these two questions: 
Is it possible, or, if possible, profitable, to study philosophy; and 
if so, what method may we use? 


I 


Is philosophy possible or profitable? 

Any one taking up philosophy for the first time must be im- 
pressed, I am sure, and possibly frightened, by the magnitude of 
the subjects under discussion. It seems quite presumptuous to 
study such immense questions as the nature of reality, the mean- 
ing and purpose of the world, and the value of life. The scien- 
tist, who devotes himself to a snug little corner of reality — for 
instance, animal morphology, geological strata, or political or- 
ganization —is perhaps inclined to criticize the philosopher for 
the largeness of his field. 

However, the scientist, whatever his domain, soon finds that 
it is anything but a snug little corner. It is revealed as so im- 
mense and has so many interrelations and reaches out to so many 
other sciences that he is almost forced into philosophy himself; 
at any rate, ceases to criticize the latter because of its largeness. 

Nevertheless, there have been schools of thinkers who, fright- 
ened or repelled by the vastness of the problems of philosophy, 
have refused to enter upon their study. Two such schools may 
be mentioned here, the Positivists and the Skeptics. 


Positivism 
The Positive Philosophy is a technical term applied by the 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 37 


French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), to his view of 
the world. Comte believed that the search for first causes, ulti- 
mate reality, and all such things, is wholly vain. The human 
mind must confine itself to actual facts, to phenomena, as we call 
them; that is, to things as they appear in our actual experience. 
It is useless to try to find out what lies back of phenomena, about 
things in themselves. Philosophy must limit itself to discover- 
ing the relationships between phenomena and their invariable 
modes of behavior. 

Comte’s interests were in sociology, a science of which he 
claimed to be the founder; and he thought that scientific meth- 
ods might be applied to the study of society to the end of great- 
ly increasing human welfare. Positivism, therefore, really 
amounts to this: Science is the final stage of human thought. It 
deals with what is certain, useful, positive, especially with what 
is useful for perfecting our social institutions. No one would 
care to disagree with Comte in his emphasis upon the value of 
science, nor would many, perhaps, question his opinion regard- 
ing the supremely important position of the social sciences. 
Few possibly would agree with him that the study of wider philo- 
sophical problems is vain. 


Skepticism 

Another school which would discourage us from approaching 
the mount of philosophy is that of the Skeptics: Skepticism 
first appeared in ancient Greece in the time of the Sophists. Gor- 
gias, for instance, said that nothing exists; if it did, we could 
not know it; if we could know it, we could not communicate 
our knowledge to others. Later, in the Greco-Roman period, 
Skepticism took the form of a “school” of philosophy led by 
Pyrrho. Although these thinkers came after the brilliant age of 
Socrates, Plato, Democritus, and Aristotle, and the many Greek 
triumphs in the fields of mathematics, logic, metaphysics, and 
ethics, nevertheless, they despaired of gaining knowledge. They 
were fond of pointing out the contradictions in the opinions of 
philosophers and of asserting in quite a dogmatic fashion, unbe- 
coming, as one would think, in a Skeptic, that knowledge is im- 


38 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


possible. The conclusion which they drew also seems strange to 
us. They thought it better to suspend judgment on all the ques- 
tions that the philosophers had discussed about God and the 
soul and the world, and thereby attain for themselves mental 
poise and tranquillity. This was a characteristic Greek attitude. 
The Greeks, especially of the later period, wanted to live in a 
tidy, well-ordered, and circumscribed world. It disturbed and 
perplexed the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics to labor with the 
unending problems which philosophy offers. All the Greek 
schools, therefore, after Aristotle, sought for some philosophy of 
life which should free their minds from fear and afford equanim- 
ity and peace. 

In modern times, Skepticism in the Greek sense has almost 
passed away. The last distinguished Skeptic was David Hume 
(1711-76), but even his skepticism is not the radical slashing 
kind of the Greeks, but rather a critical inquiry into the actual 
limits of knowledge. Faint-hearted resignation does not com- 
mend itself to our modern genius. A resolute and hopeful facing 
of every problem with persistent and undaunted efforts to solve 
it — this is the modern spirit. Philosophers may differ, human 
judgment may be fallible, our senses may deceive us; but we will 
find out which of the philosophers is right, how wrong judgment 
may be righted, and how the deception of the senses may be cor- 
rected. The modern spirit is one of courage and adventure. 
Hardship and death attended the discovery of the Antarctic pole; 
but all difficulties were surmounted and the pole was visited. 
The top of Mount Everest has not yet been reached; but it 
draws us on and will sooner or later be conquered. ‘Two stu- 
dents were heard discussing their courses of study. One said, “I 
am going to specialize in organic chemistry.” ‘‘ Why?” asked 
the other. ‘‘Because,” said the first, “I believe it offers more 
problems now than any other subject.” There is plenty of doubt 
in modern thought, but it acts, not as an anodyne to lull us into 
equanimity, but as a spur to drive us to further and more persist- 
ent inquiry. Hence doubt has an important function in our 
philosophizing, not only spurring us to action, but discouraging 
dogmatism. Bertrand Russell speaks of ‘“‘liberating doubt.” 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 39 


“Philosophy,” he says, ‘‘removes the somewhat arrogant dog- 
matism of those who have traveled into the region of liberating 
doubt and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing famil- 
iar things in an unfamiliar aspect.” 

“Rather I prize the doubt 


Low kinds exist without, 
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.’’ 


Browning would surely have little sympathy with one who 
should say that the questions of philosophy cannot be answered; 
therefore, we should not raise them. To him life is an eternal 
adventure, an endless process of development, in which 


“We fall to rise, are baffled to fight better.” 


Doubt and even bewilderment beset the student in the pursuit of 
philosophy, but to raise the doubt, pursue the truth, and hope to 
attain it — this is the great adventure of the human spirit. 

We hear more now of Agnosticism than of Skepticism. The 
term was first used by Huxley, but has usually been associated 
with the name of Herbert Spencer. In its Greek origin it means 
“without knowledge.’”’ Spencer believed that absolute know- 
ledge is impossible. All knowledge is relative and cannot go far- 
ther than such facts as matter, motion, force, and consciousness, 
and all these are merely symbols or modes of the Unknowable. 
Spencer’s Agnosticism is thus only a form of Positivism, and not 
of the extreme type, since he goes further in his assertions about 
the Unknowable than a positivist would feel entitled to do. 

Huxley used the word in a religious sense to indicate his belief 
that, though we may not deny the existence of God, we can know 
nothing of his real nature. This is the more common meaning of 
the word Agnosticism now. In philosophy it is generally used in 
its Spencerian sense, indicating that human knowledge is relative 
and limited, so that knowledge of ultimate reality is impossible. 
There would seem to be little to criticize in such a guarded Ag- 
nosticism as this, but in general Agnosticism is too apt to empha- 
size the limitations of knowledge, sometimes having a flavor of 
dogmatism, confidently affirming that the kind of knowledge 
which philosophy seeks is unattainable, thus going beyond the 


40 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


more modest attitude of doubt. It is therefore contrary to the 
spirit of philosophy, which is that of persistent, unwearied in- 
quiry. One writer speaks of the agnostic as a quitter.} 


Some world view inevitable 

The fact is that the whole discussion as to whether we shall or 
shall not enter upon the study of philosophy was settled long ago 
by Aristotle when he said, “‘Whether we will philosophize or 
whether we won’t philosophize, we must philosophize.”’ Wisely 
Edwin Wallace said, ‘‘Consciously or unconsciously every man 
frames for himself a theory of the relation of the individual to the 
universe, and on his attitude to that question his whole life and 
conduct, public and private, depend.”’ 

Most people who decry the study of philosophy have a system 
of their own often quite complete. Some theory of God they 
have, if only it is to deny that there is any God. Some theory 
of the universe they have, if only the three-story view of 
““Heaven above, Hell below, and the Earth in between.’”’ Some 
theory of values they have, if only that personal gain is the high- 
est good. Since, then, we are all to have some theory of life and 
the world, it will be well to have as intelligent a theory as pos- 
sible, formed after a critical and historical study. It will be well 
to study the great world views of the great world thinkers, of 
Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Darwin, Royce, 
and James. We shall be surprised to find, if we follow the history 
of philosophy down to the present, how great has been the pro- 
gress in really solving many of the difficult problems, and how 
idle is the complaint that they cannot be solved. 

There is a general impression that metaphysical inquiries are 
especially baffling, and that the history of philosophy is a history 
of speculative theories, quite in contrast to the steady and trium- 
phant progress of the physical sciences. It is true that tremen- 
dous progress has been made in the physical sciences in the last 
hundred years; but it is also true that the history of science is a 
history of discarded theories. Recently some of our most cher- 
ished beliefs respecting the Euclidean geometry, the Newtonian 

1 Scudder Klyce, in his Universe, p. 9. 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 41 


physics, and the Darwinian theory of evolution have been called 
in question, and in late years our theories of the constitution of 
matter have been revolutionized. Nevertheless, there has been 
a steady and brilliant advance. Precisely the same is true of 
philosophy. I should say that in the last twenty-five years 
progress in philosophy has been quite as rapid and quite as 
brilliant as progress in science, if, indeed, we wish to make any 
sharp contrast between them. 


In some respects, indeed, “science” has made less progress than 
“philosophy”? — its most general conceptions would astonish neither 
Aristotle nor Descartes, could they revisit our earth. The composition 
of things from elements, their evolution, the conservation of energy, the 
_ idea of a universal determinism, would seem to them commonplace 
enough — the little things, the microscopes, electric lights, telephones, 
and details of the sciences, would be to them the awe-inspiring things. 
But if they opened our books on metaphysics, or visited a philosophic 
lecture room, everything would sound strange. The whole idealistic or 
“critical” attitude of our time would be novel, and it would be long 
before they took it in.} 


Science not to be confused with applied science 

I suppose the reason that the advance in science seems so 
much greater than the advance in philosophy is because our at- 
tention is usually fixed on the brilliant results of the special sci- 
ences in the mechanic and industrial arts. It is not science, but 
applied science, that is meant. We have become accustomed to 
swell with pride when we think of what science has done for man. 
Every schoolgirl knows by heart the long list of benefits which it 
has conferred, the wireless telegraph and telephone, the ocean 
greyhound, the limited express, the automobile, the aerial mail, 
the long list of time-savers and labor-savers adding to our daily 
comfort; the conquest of disease through public sanitation, anti- 
septic surgery, and preventive medicine; the application of chem- 
istry to agriculture, and the shortening of the hours of labor by 
the invention of machinery. 


1 William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Longmans, Green and Com- 
pany), p. 24. See also the article by James Ward on “The Progress of Philoso- 
phy” in Mind, vol. 15, no. Lv, carrying the same thought. 


42 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Lately, however, and especially since the Great War, one hears 
less about the benefits conferred upon humanity by the me- 
chanic arts. The social crisis through which the world is now 
struggling has led many to question, not the value of the physical 
sciences, nor even that of applied science, but the direction in 
which science has been applied. Perhaps the most conspicuous 
of the “‘triumphs” of applied science has been in the art of war, 
which actually threatens the destruction of our civilization. 
One muses also on our countless time-saving devices, wondering 
whether they have given us any more time for things really im- 
portant. Are labor-saving inventions a benefit to humanity un- 
less they are accompanied by a knowledge of how to use the new 
leisure? Has the moral and intellectual and esthetic education of 
man advanced at equal pace with the progress of the mechanic 
arts, so that he can be trusted with his suddenly acquired wealth 
and leisure? Is it possible that our method of combating disease 
by protecting us from infective agencies may have the effect of 
weakening our resistance to disease? Is it true, as Todd says, 
that a pasteurized and sanitized society is not necessarily pro- 
gressive or dynamic? 

All these questions set us thinking. It is just possible that too 
much attention has been given to applied science and not enough 
to applied philosophy. Or perhaps science has been applied in 
the wrong directions. Possibly, instead of applying it with such 
dazzling success to the arts of war, to the increase of wealth, and 
to the accumulation of externalities, it should have been applied 
more to education, and to the conservation of racial, moral, and 
economic values. We have acquired too much wealth and not 
enough wisdom. 


By virtue of the advancement that has long been going on with ever 
accelerated logarithmic rapidity in invention, in mathematics, in 
physics, in chemistry, in biology, in astronomy, and in applications of 
them, time and space and matter have been already conquered to such 
an extent that our globe; once so seemingly vast, has virtually shrunken 
to the dimensions of an ancient province; and manifold peoples of 
divers tongues and traditions and customs and institutions are now 
constrained to live together as in a single community. ‘There is thus 
demanded a new ethical wisdom, a new legal wisdom, a new economical 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 43 


wisdom, a new political wisdom, a new wisdom in the affairs of govern- 
ment. For the new visions our anguished times cry aloud but the 
only answers are reverberated echoes of the wailing cry ningled with 
the chattering voices of excited public men who know not what to do. 
Why? What is the explanation? The question is double: Why the 
disease? And why no remedy at hand? The answer is the same for 
both. And the answer is that the so-called sciences of ethics and juris- 
prudence and economics and politics and government have not kept 
pace with the rapid progress made in the other great affairs of man; they 
have lagged behind; it is because of their lagging that the world has 
come to be in so great distress; and it is because of their lagging that 
they have not now the needed wisdom to effect a cure.... 

At present the future of mankind is dark. ‘‘Stop, look, and listen” 
— the prudent caution at railroad crossings — must be amended to 
read ‘“‘stop, look, listen, and TH1nK’’; not for the saving of a few lives in 
railroad accidents, but for the preservation of the life of humanity.} 


Students of philosophy, therefore, need no longer be fright- 
ened away by a comparison of the meager fruits of philosophy 
with the richer fruits of science. If by philosophy we mean not 
systems of metaphysics or futile discussions about the Absolute, 
but rather the search for wisdom, the appraisement of values, 
and the careful logical analysis of concepts, it seems to be just 
what the world needs now. 


It 


Method 

Philosophy, like science, is the search for truth, and it must, 
like science, pursue its search by the most rigorous logical meth- 
ods. Scientific method itself is a result of philosophical inquiry, 
and science owes to philosophy the successive discoveries which 
have revealed the necessary steps in logical method. But philos- 
ophy itself claims no exemption from the rigor of the rules which 
must be followed in the pursuit of truth. Philosophy differs 
from science, not in its method, but in its subject-matter. It 
surveys the whole field of experience and: even the conditions of 
experience itself — as well as the law of thought by which we 
try to think through all these problems. 


1 Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity (EB. P. Dutton and Company), 
pp. 20, 21, and 30. 


4d INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Into the subject of logical method in general we have no need 
to enter here. For our purpose it will be quite sufficient just to 
mention the methods that are used in philosophy and to give a 
few simple rules to govern our thinking. But first we must ex- 
amine a certain claim that has been made that philosophy does 
have a kind of esoteric method by which it can approach more 
directly to the portals of truth — at least some kinds of truth — 
than through the laborious method of logical research. 


Mysticism 

All through the history of thought there have appeared from 
time to time philosophers who have laid claim to a special and 
exclusive method. These were the Mystics. Mysticism is an 
interesting chapter in the history of thought; some of the finer 
spirits are found in this company. Perhaps their claim to a 
peculiar and direct insight into truth should not be hastily 
rejected. 

The Mystics believe that certain kinds of knowledge, particu- 
larly the knowledge of God, come not through the labored efforts 
of reflective thinking, but through direct insight and intuition. 
The powers of reason may sometimes be transcended and we 
may have a direct approach to God, or an immediate union with 
reality, so that truth is felt, apprehended, or grasped in a single 
pulse of the soul life. Something like moments of ecstatic con- 
templation bring us face to face with reality. 

Such was the view of Plotinus (204-69 a.p.), the Neo-Pla- 
tonist, and something like this has been held by a great company 
of Christian Mystics, such as Saint Teresa, Saint John of the 
Cross, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, and George Fox; while 
mystical views may be found in the poetry of Shelley, Words- 
worth, Tennyson, and Whitman, and in the Essays of Emerson. 
Indeed, Bergson, one of the most widely known and widely read 
of the philosophers of the present day, a psychologist, biologist, 
and evolutionist, teaches a kind of mysticism; for with Bergson, 
intuition is superior to intellect. Intuition is almost synony- 
mous with life itself, leading us, at any rate, to the very portals of 
life. It is a kind of divining sympathy, like animal instinct, - 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 45 


only become self-conscious and capable of reflecting upon its 
object. 

There is a certain rapport between nature and mind, which in 
our purely intellectual and scientific moods we cannot gain, and 
through which there comes to us a peculiar insight into the inner- 
most secrets of life. This is not, in Bergson’s view, like a revela- 
tion which comes to the mind from without, as in the older 
Mysticism. It is rather due to the fact that the mind itself is a 
part of the very current of life, which is more real than matter. 
This does not mean, as I understand Bergson, that philosophy 
has any esoteric method of discovering truth which science does 
not have; it means rather that the particular task which con- 
fronts the scientist in his dealing with the world of matter makes 
the intellect hisinstrument. But if the scientist in his philosoph- 
ical moods were to go in search of reality, he would find himself in 
possession of another avenue of approach through direct intui- 
tion. The work of the philosopher here is somewhat like that of 
the artist, who identifies himself with the object, ‘‘ putting him- 
self back within the object by a kind of sympathy.” It is as if, 
when we approach nature by means of the intellect, a certain 
“barrier”? exists between nature and the mind, which intuition 
breaks down through sympathetic communication. 

If this be Mysticism, surely the word should connote no qual- 
ity of error, asit commonly does. It should rather be considered 
an interesting ‘‘lead”’ to follow up in our further search for the 
sources of knowledge. Just at present we may neglect this wider 
question, for we are now concerned not so much with the sources 
of truth as with the methods we may use in our study of philos- 
ophy; but I wonder whether the ordinary processes of reflective 
thinking do not involve a certain kind of intuition after all, not 
so wholly different from that which Bergson tells us of. 


Method in philosophy 

Let us begin with the ordinary method of reflective thought, 
as it is used in daily life and in scientific investigation. Later 
we may ask whether this method can be used in philosophy, and 
if so whether it is the best or the only method. Dewey, in his 


46 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


little book How We Think, has given us a clear account of the 
procedure of reflective thinking.! Reflective thinking begins 
when there is some problem to be solved or difficulty to be met, 
as when, following a strange road, a traveler comes to where it 
forks; he will have to do some thinking then if he has never done 
any before. Deciding which road to follow is a little problem; 
philosophy offers us big problems, but the method of solution is 
the same. 

First, we must analyze the situation carefully and collect all 
the facts bearing on it that we can; and we must be fair and im- 
partial and unprejudiced in our observation of the facts. This 
elimination of the personal equation, of our tastes and prefer- 
ences, of our likes and dislikes, and of our traditional and reli- 
gious systems, is exceedingly difficult, and the failure to observe 
this has been the source of mischief in countless cases of philos- 
ophizing in the past. Prejudice leads us astray in the reflective 
thinking of our daily life and has been the cause of abundant 
error even in science. No progress in science or philosophy can 
be made, if we commit ourselves in advance to some fond theory. 
In daily life, when some problem suddenly presents itself, we are 
apt to fall back upon habit or custom in deciding it. Most of us 
have some ready-made ‘‘system,’’ some favorite collection of 
ideas, which we have gotten from tradition or social inheritance, 
or from our political party, or our church, or perhaps from some 
book which has impressed us deeply, or from some new “‘move- 
ment’’ in poetry or popular fiction, or even possibly from an im- 
pressive picture on the screen, and we solve the troublesome 
intruding problem offhand by reference to this system. And it 
is very probable that in our solution of the question we shall be 
strongly influenced by our personal feelings, our wishes, and de- 
sires. Some ‘‘emotional complex” will decide the question for us. 

But in philosophy and science our reflective thinking must be 
freed from these errors of ‘‘systems” and subjective interests, 
those “idols” of the theater and the cave, as Bacon called them. 


1A further detailed description of the processes of thought as applied to 
science and philosophy may be found in an excellent book entitled An Introduc- 
tion to Reflective Thinking, by Columbia University Associates in Philosophy. . 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 47 


This freedom from prejudice is an ideal which is very difficult to 
realize. In the physical sciences it has been realized in a remark- 
able fashion by a great army of patient, persistent, and unpreju- 
diced workers, and the rich contributions which they have made 
to knowledge attest the fruitfulness of this method. In philoso- 
phy this wholly impartial attitude is even more difficult than in 
science, and few of us attain it. But so far as it is possible, every 
problem whether in philosophy or in science must be approached 
in the spirit of genuine scientific interest, whose motive is a keen 
desire to know, a real scientific curiosity. 


The “suggestion” 

The second step in philosophical method, after the preliminary 
observation of facts, is the proposed solution of the problem. 
This is what Dewey calls the ‘‘suggestion.”’ It is also called the 
hypothesis or provisional theory. Oftentimes it comes as a flash 
of insight — a kind of intuition of the solution of the problem. 
It ranks in importance with the patient observation of facts 
which precedes and follows the suggestion. It may come after a 
preliminary observation of a few of the facts in the situation. It 
may come after years of laborious investigation, or after weary 
months of careful cataloguing of observations. It may even 
come at the very beginning of the investigation. It furnishes the 
clue to work from, and adds immense zest to the research. Our 
minds function in such a way that we have to have a theory to 
work on. The theory may be wrong and will have to be dis- 
carded when experiment and further observation have failed to 
verify it. Butit must be verified when the nature of the problem 
makes verification possible; and where some kind of verification 
is not possible, research soon loses its interest. In verification 
the logical process involves deductive reasoning. We assume 
for the moment that our theory, our ‘‘guess,’”’ is true and we 
deduce its consequences, and then rigorously compare the impli- 
cations of the theory with the actual facts. It is an If— then 
process of thought; ¢f the theory is true, then such and such 
things would follow. Do these things square with the facts? 

Midway between stations your motor car stops. You anx- 


48 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


iously seek the cause. To find it is ‘‘the problem.”” Some one 
makes a ‘“‘suggestion.”” Probably each member of the party 
makes one. The gas is out, a connection is broken, a piston has 
jammed, a feed-pipe is clogged. You take the most promising 
suggestion and try it out. “Trying it out”? means deducing the 
consequences of the theory and comparing them with the facts. 
If not verified, you try another. 

A physician is called to see a patient who is ill. To find the 
cause of the trouble or the character of the disease is his ‘‘ prob- 
lem.’”’ He makes a few preliminary observations of the facts, 
asks questions, tests pulse and temperature. Then a suggestion 
comes to him — typhoid fever. Jf itis typhoid, then certain hid- 
den symptoms will be present. He makes these decisive tests 
and verifies his hypothesis, or disproves it. 

This is the method of reflective thinking in our daily life; it 
is the method by which great discoveries have been made in 
science; it is a method which must commonly be used in philo- 
sophical inquiries. 

But the question will present itself whether it is possible to use 
this method in philosophy. How can we apply it to the great 
life problems about God and the world and the soul? Is not veri- 
fication the all-important part in the method, and 1s verification 
possible in these large world problems? Is not philosophy in 
danger of becoming speculative just because verification is im- 
possible? 

In answer to this I think we may say that the method in ques- 
tion is merely the method of reflective thinking, and no matter 
how stupendous our problems, we must reflect upon them. We 
do not mean that philosophical inquiry is limited to this method. 
We shall notice presently other ways of studying, such as logical 
analysis, analogy, and the historical method. But in that con- 
structive part of philosophy in which you and I are most inter- 
ested, after we have made full use of critical analysis and the 
study of the history of our subject, we must still continue to re- 
flect upon it, and the success of our reflection will be in propor- 
tion as our observations are careful and impartial, our experience 
wide and varied, and our intuitions profound. 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 49 


A very peculiar importance attaches to that part of scientific 
method which we call the suggestion, the flash of insight into the 
solution of the problem. This is where brains count — and ex- 
perience. When our motor car stops, a lot of foolish suggestions 
may be made. Some one in the party will make the useful sug- 
gestion, and this person will be the wise one, and his wisdom will 
consist partly in his experience with motor cars and partly in — 
brains. The great discoveries in science and philosophy have 
been made by great men. Anybody can see an apple fall. A 
few may ask why it falls. Only the great brain of a Newton can 
project a theory of gravitation. Nowhere is the almost uncanny 
power of mind seen so clearly as in the recent investigations of 
- physicists into the electrical nature of the atom, or the investiga- 
tions of mathematicians into the theory of relativity. It is the 
creative power of thought, sometimes called the creative imagi- 
nation. In its higher forms, it seems like a special endowment of 
genius — a kind of vision or inspiration. Sagacity is what James 
called it. ; 

But the vision of truth does not come from sagacity alone; or, 
if it does, sagacity must include experience. The “ wise’? man in 
philosophy and science is not merely the “‘seer’’; he is the man 
who knows, as well as the man who sees. The one who is quick 
to detect the trouble with your motor is the man who has had ex- 
perience with motors and their ways. The great scientist is, to 
be sure, the great-brained man — but he is also usually the man 
versed in the whole lore and history of his science. So the great 
philosopher will be the man not only of deep insight, but a man 
of rich experience and profound knowledge of life. 

Thus the method of philosophy is empirical. Our theories 
must spring out of experience and be tested by experience. A 
crucial test in the physical laboratory may not be possible, but in 
the laboratory of life the hypothesis must find its verification. 
The failures in the history of philosophy — and they have been 
many — have been partly due to the neglect of that close touch 
with life which is essential. A philosophical theory that comes 
into conflict with no accepted principles of science or philosophy, 
that is self-consistent, and that has been formed only after the 


50 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


most careful and impartial analysis of all the factors involved and 
after the widest appeal to human experience, is to that extent 
verified. Its wide appeal, its satisfactory working, even the 
prestige which it may have because of the successful scientific 
achievements of its proponent, are all steps in the process of veri- 
fication. 

This method of reflective thinking, as we have just outlined it, 
is the method by which constructive work in philosophy is done. 
But perhaps the student will say; ‘‘I do not hope to do construc- 
tive work; I am only anxious to know about philosophy, to have 
my questions answered and my doubts resolved.”” But to study 
philosophy is to philosophize. In a lecture room in a certain 
American university there is a motto which says, ov diAocodia, 
arra hirocodpéiv, “not philosophy, but to philosophize.” It is 
the thinking about the great questions of life that does us good, 
rather than the study of the thoughts of other men. But in any 
case, even if we are following another, we must identify ourselves 
with his thought — we must engage in reflective thinking. 


Method of critical analysis 

A preliminary task in the study of philosophy is the critical 
analysis of concepts. We have referred to this in a former chap- 
ter and it need only be mentioned here as a distinct method of the 
very greatest Importance. It is wonderful how the light may be 
thrown upon many old controversies by the critical analysis of 
the terms and concepts used. In the old free-will controversy, 
for instance, much of the difficulty may be removed by critical 
analysis of the terms used. Even this method is by no means 
confined to philosophical problems. It would, of course, be used 
in any investigation which hoped for accuracy, although this 
part of the work might be called philosophical. But it often 
happens in the physical sciences that concepts are used in a sense 
adequate for the purpose in hand, but in need of a more thorough 
analysis when applied beyond the sphere of these sciences. 
Such, for instance, is the case with the notion of “cause,” or 
“law of nature,” “space,” “time,” and many others. Philoso- 
phy may undertake such an analysis. 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 51 


Closely related to this method is the logical-analytical method 
proposed by Bertrand Russell as the sole method which philoso- 
phy should use, by which he hopes to rescue philosophy from its 
mysticism and evolutionism and reduce it to an exact science as 
rigorous as logic or mathematics. To this end he proposes to 
eliminate all question of values and meanings from philosophy, 
and all “the ambitious constructions of traditional metaphysics,”’ 
and confine it to the logical analysis of facts of experience, those 
familiar things which are found upon analysis to be very com- 
plex, such, for instance, as our knowledge of the external world or 
the notion of cause. Russell has illustrated his method with 
striking results in the analysis of the things mentioned, as well as 

of the theory of continuity and the problem of infinity.! He 
admits that philosophy will thus “deal with somewhat dry 
and abstract matters, and must not hope to find an answer to 
the practical problems of life’’; but there will be compensation 
for this in the new sense of power which this method gives us. 

Important as the logical-analytical method is, I see no reason 
why philosophy should be confined to it. One of the ‘‘facts” 
which I suppose Russell would subject to logical analysis would 
be the interest which nearly all of us have in questions of value 
and meaning. It would be a somber philosophy which should 
limit itself to analyzing these desires, hardly compensated for by 
the mathematical beauty of the analysis. Possibly the human 
mind, if it can make true analyses, may also make true syntheses. 


Deductive methods 

When we survey the history of philosophy the question may 
arise whether the method of reflective thinking as described 
above has been the method actually used in philosophy. We 
shall probably find that methods more purely deductive have 
commonly been used. From Plato to the present, rationalistic 
methods, dialectic, logistic, the method of postulates, and the 
like, have abounded. Whether these methods would have 
yielded philosophical truth in greater measure had they included 
a wider appeal to experience, may well be asked. But in these 

1 See his Scientific Method in Philosophy. 


52 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


philosophies the appeal is not to experience, but to logical con- 
sistency, or to intuition. New systems of geometry, based upon 
assumptions quite different from the older ones, give us by their 
freedom from contradiction a certain joy of power, such as be- 
longs to the explorer. A somewhat similar fascination attaches 
to systems of dialectic like that of Hegel; but when all is done, 
the student of philosophy is tempted to say — To what end and 
for what good? 

Not quite the same, perhaps, may be said of the deductive 
systems based neither upon experience nor upon mere postulates 
and assumptions, but upon zntuztion, whether we use the word 
intuition in the slightly mystical sense of Bergson, or in the 
severer Kantian sense of an original activity of the mind. May 
we not start in our philosophizing with that of which we are 
immediately aware, or primarily conscious? Is reality revealed 
to us in the bare act of thought? If we start with such intuitions 
and proceed in our philosophy by strictly logical methods, will 
any verification which comes from experiment or from experience 
add to the validity of our results? Or, even if we doubt whether 
the mind has any such immediate intuitions, is there nothing to 
be said for “‘the venture of faith’’?? And in the so-called norma- 
tive sciences, such as ethics and esthetics, may we not start 
outright with certain ideals, such as would not be strengthened 
by any appeal to experience? Certainly we are not justified in 
making any dogmatic answer to such questions as these. Some, 
of course, will doubt whether such intuitions, ventures of faith, 
or ideals will help us forward in philosophy unless in the last 
analysis they spring from life and experience. 


The history of philosophy 

Owing to the abstract-and difficult character of philosophical 
inquiries, their study is usually approached historically. The 
history of philosophy is perhaps the best approach to the whole 
subject. No matter how large the problems are, we may at any 
rate quite modestly approach them by historical inquiry. We 
may read what Plato and Aristotle, what Descartes, Spinoza, 
Kant, and Royce have written about them. We may associate 


METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 53 


for a while with the great men of the past. The history of philos- 
ophy is only the history of reflective thought on subjects peculiar 
to this study. The great philosophers have been among the great 
thinkers of the world, and their thought may for that reason be 
in the nature of visions. If one were to enumerate the philoso- 
phers from Democritus to William James, one would find that 
they have been men who have powerfully impressed themselves 
upon their own and subsequent times. Plato was a literary genius 
whose Dialogues have charmed readers of every age. Aristotle 

made great discoveries in logic and science and wrote profound 

works on ethics and politics. Descartes was the founder of an- 

alytical geometry, and the discoverer of important laws in phys- 

ics and optics. Leibniz was a mathematical genius giving us 

the infinitesimal calculus. Francis Bacon was Lord Chancellor 

of England. Locke was an influential statesman in the reign of 

William and Mary, and one of the sources of modern educational 

ideas. Hume was probably the most profound thinker that 

Scotland has ever produced. Kant anticipated the nebular hy- 

pothesis. Herbert Spencer was a contributor to many branches 

of science, and one of the sources of evolutionary thought. 

James almost revolutionized the science of psychology. When 

men of this type speak on the profound questions of philosophy, 

they command our attention. In the end, however, we shall not 

be satisfied to rest in their opinions; we shall subject them to crit- 

ical analysis and complete them by our own reflective thought. 


Introduction to philosophy 

Finally, there is a still more modest method of studying phi- 
losophy than that of its history. Preliminary even to this is 
the definition of terms and the mere statement and exposition of 
the various problems, with the mention of the different theories 
about them. It is to this preliminary task that the present book 
is devoted. We may define terms and explain theories and per- 
haps to some extent examine critically the concepts used. Pos- 
sibly we may find that the divergence among the various sys- 
tems of philosophy — a divergence much exploited by the critics 
—is not so great as it seems. This would seem to be the ideal 


54 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


way to take up the study of philosophy: first, through an “ Intro- 
duction,” to get the terms, problems, and typical theories before 
us; second, through the study of the history of philosophy, to 
gain a knowledge of the opinions of its great men; third, to apply 
to all the problems the method of critical analysis and reflective 
thought. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance (Houghton 
Mifflin Company), chap. xrv, ‘‘ Science and Scientific Method.” 
Descartes, Discourse on Method, as found in the works of Descartes, or in 


Rand’s Modern Classical Philosophers (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
pp. 101-16. 


Further references: 

John Dewey, How We Think. (D.C. Heath and Company.) 

J. Arthur Thomson, Introduction to Science (Home University Library, 
Henry Holt and Company), chap. 11. 

Columbia Associates in Philosophy, Introduction to Reflective Thinking. 
(Houghton Mifflin Company.) 

T. P. Nunn, The Aim and Achievement of Scientific Method. (The Mac- 
millan Company.) 

A. N. Whitehead, The Organization of Thought (Williams and Norgate), 
chap. VI. 

Douglas Clyde Macintosh, The Problem of Knowledge (The Macmillan 
Company), chap. xx, “‘ The Problem of Scientific Method.” 

Cassius J. Keyser, The Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking (Columbia 
University Press), chap. I. 

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (Scientific Method 
in Philosophy). (The Open Court Publishing Company.) See also 
his more concise chapter “On Scientific Method in Philosophy ” in his 
Mysticism and Logic (Longmans, Green and Company), chap. vI. 


CHAPTER V 
SYNOPSIS OF SUBJECTS 


In what order shall we pursue our philosophical inquiries and 
with which ones shall we begin? Will they group themselves into 
‘some definite plan, so that we can get a bird’s-eye view of them at 
the beginning? When the little girl looked out the window and 
asked her mother how there came to be any world, I think she 
taught us where to begin. What is the world, how did it get 
started, and how has it grown to its present estate? The an- 
cient Greeks, who first studied philosophy in a systematic way, 
began also with these questions. They called them cosmological 
inquiries. 


Cosmological inquiries 

We may, then, adopt this plan and begin with the PT of 
Cosmology, inquiring first about the Cosmos, or the Universe, 
and about the nature of Space and Time. Then we may ask 
about the Earth and the first beginnings of Life upon its surface. 
Then will follow easily the study of the Evolution of life, and this 
will suggest the problem of its Purposiveness, if it have any. 
Then the question will arise whether the world is a created 
product, and, if so, who or what was its creator? Can we be- 
lieve in God? If God exists and is good, how can we explain 
the presence of so much Evil everywhere? 

Let us, then, call the above our first group of problems, and for 
convenience we may put them in tabular form: 


The Cosmos, Space, Time 
The Nature and Origin of Life 
I. Cosmological } The Philosophy of Evolution 
Inquiries Is the World Purposive? 
The Problem of God 
The Problem of Evil — Pessimism 


Ontological inquiries 
Very early in the history of philosophy, thinkers began to ask 


56 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


about the stuff the world is made of. Can everything in the uni- 
verse be resolved into some elementary form of being, some ulti- 
mate reality, such, for instance, as matter, or energy, or mind? 
This is the ancient problem of Reality, or the problem of Being. 
The technical term for it is Ontology, from two Greek words 
meaning the science of being. It represents the search for the 
“First Principle.” We love to reduce everything to some final 
unity or elementary ‘‘stuff’’; and if we believe that we have 
found such a final unity, we call our theory of reality a monistic 
view, or just Monism, from a Greek word signifying alone or sin- 
gle. Ifnow we believe that there is only one ultimate reality and 
that this reality is matter, we may call this view Materialistic 
Monism, or just Materialism. On the other hand, if we come to 
the conclusion that the one ultimate reality is not matter, but 
Mind, or Spirit, we may call this view Spiritualistic Monism, or 
Spiritualism. Sometimes it has been called Idealism. 

But perhaps we shall not succeed in resolving the whole world 
into one elementary substance and shall find that in the very last 
analysis there are two ultimate forms of being, such as Mind and 
Matter. If so, we may call this theory Dualism, from the Latin 
word for two. 

Or, finally, it is just possible that reality cannot be reduced 
even to two ultimate forms, but that there are more than two, 
possibly many. ‘Then our theory of reality will be called Plural- 
ism. These Ontological problems we shall find difficult to solve 
and the various answers not quite satisfactory; but men have al- 
ways wondered about ultimate reality and we can at least study 
the various views of the philosophers. This second class of in- 
quiries we may also put in tabular form. . 


Manian Materialism 


II. Ontological Spiritualism or Idealism 


ss Dualism. 
Inquiries 


Pluralism 


The philosophy of mind 
Next will come a series of inquiries of the most urgent and in- 


SYNOPSIS OF SUBJECTS 57 


timate kind — inquiries about the Mind. We should like to 
know what the Mind is and whether it is different from the Soul, 
or the Spirit, and we are curious to know about Consciousness 
and Self and Personality, and how the Mind is related to the 
Body, and whether the old problem about the Freedom of the 
Will has been settled, and whether, finally, the Soul is, or can be, 
immortal. 

All these would seem to be psychological inquiries, since they 
relate to the Psyche or Soul. But the study of the mind is of 
such immediate interest that it has become the subject of a 
special empirical science devoted to the investigation of mental 
processes and the term Psychology has been appropriated for this 
science. So in philosophy those larger and more ultimate ques- 
tions which the science of psychology has not yet approached we 
may include under the general name, The Philosophy of Mind. 
In tabular form these inquiries will appear as follows: 


Historical 
The Search for the Soul MUM Sa ca 


III. The Philosophy of Mind ) The Relation of Soul and Body 
The Freedom of the Will 


The theory of Knowledge 

Even before we reach this point in our philosophizing, we shall 
encounter so many difficulties and find our doubts so hard to re- 
solve that we shall begin to wonder whether the human mind is 
capable of real knowledge and whether the best avenues of know- 
ledge are through the sense organs or through some “‘faculty”’ of 
reason. So we shall be forced into the study of the Theory of 
Knowledge, or Epistemology, as itis called. Perhaps some read- 
ers will think that we should have begun with this — and that, 
no doubt, would be the logical order. But the Theory of Know- 
ledge is a difficult subject, and if presented first might frighten us 
away from the study of philosophy — and I think that we may 
assume tentatively that the human mind does have the power of 
real knowledge, and that such real knowledge is offered us in the 
special sciences. In general, faith is better than skepticism as a 


58 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


point of departure. Later we may ask about the sources and the 
validity of human knowledge. This inquiry will cover the fol- 
lowing special subjects: 


The Sources of Knowledge — dis- 
cussing the rival theories called 
Rationalism and Empiricism 


The Validity of Knowledge — as 
seen from the standpoint of Real- 
ism and Idealism 


IV. The Theory of Knowledge 
or 
Epistemology 


Pragmatism — its theory of know- 
ledge and of truth 


The higher values of life 

The topics mentioned above form the outline of the introduc- 
tion to philosophy in its essential parts. But there are certain 
other subjects which are often taken up in philosophy, although 
they are more fully treated in special disciplines, such as Logic, 
Ethics, and A‘sthetics, the so-called practical sciences studying 
the laws of thought and of conduct and of artistic expression and 
appreciation. ‘These practical sciences are concerned with Val- 
ues, or Ends to be gained, and are therefore quite different from 
the theoretical discussions about life and mind and the nature of 
reality, such as occupy us in the systematic study of philosophy. 
In the present book we must at least find time to examine in 
brief chapters a few of the fundamental principles in Ethics and 
Aésthetics, involving what we may call the higher values of life. 
So our fifth division will be as follows: 


Moral Values 


V. The Higher Values of Life Upsthetie Values 


The following table, combining these several groups of inquir- 
ies, will show at a glance the road we have to travel: 


The Cosmos, Space, Time 

The Nature and Origin of Life 
The Philosophy of Evolution 

Is the World Purposive? 

The Problem of God 

The Problem of Evil — Pessimism 


I. Cosmological Inquiries 


SYNOPSIS OF SUBJECTS 59 


Nora Materialism 
Spiritualism or Idealism 
II. Ontological Inquiries Dualism 


Pluralism 


The Search for the § Historical 

Soul Reconstructive 
The Relation of Soul and Body 
The Freedom of the Will 


III. The Philosophy of Mind 


The Sources of Knowledge — dis- 
cussing the rival theories called 

IY. The Theory of Knowledge Rationalism and Empiricism 
or 


Epistemology The Validity of Knowledge — as seen 


from the standpoint of Realism 
and Idealism 


Pragmatism — its theory of know- 
ledge and of truth 


Moral Values 


V. The Higher Values of Life Alathetis Valiies 


CHAPTER VI 
THE COSMOS 


By the word Cosmos we mean the Universe considered as an or- 
derly whole, including the Earth, the Solar System, and the Stars. 
Cosmos is a Greek word suggesting the idea of an ordered whole. 
It is usually translated into English by the word World. The 
latter, however, has several meanings, referring sometimes to our 
Earth or Globe, sometimes to the whole of physical nature, 
sometimes to the Cosmos or Universe. 


Our Universe 

Here we first avail ourselves of all the rich knowledge which 
the special sciences have accumulated. From the science of as- 
tronomy we learn that the earth upon which we live is one of the 
smaller of the eight planets revolving around the Sun. And itis 
relatively near the Sun, for its distance of 93,000,000 miles seems 
little as compared with the distance of the outer planet, Nep- 
tune, which is about three thousand million miles distant from 
the Sun. Light comes from the Sun to the Earth in about eight 
minutes, but requires four and one half hours to travel from the 
Sun to Neptune. 

The Sun and its eight planets and many asteroids and comets 
constitute our Solar System, being a little colony in that im- 
mensely larger group of stars which we may call Our Universe, 
but which astronomers call the Galaxy, or the Galactic System. 
This Universe has perhaps one to two thousand million stars, each 
one of which may be a sun like ours, and conceivably might have 
its own planets. Some of these other suns are immensely larger 
than ours. Among those that have been measured, one, Betel- 
geuse, the red giant, so conspicuous in the constellation Orion, 
has a diameter three hundred times greater than that of our Sun. 
The one or two thousand million stars constituting the Galaxy 
are not scattered through space, but are in a gigantic cluster, 


THE COSMOS 61 


shaped like a dise or watch-case, only not so flattened as the lat- 
ter. Our Sun is somewhat off the center of this Universe and is 
moving with its planets through the other stars. But, although 
our Solar System is nearly six thousand million miles in diameter, 
the chance of its ever coming near any other solar system is not 
great, for the very nearest of the other stars — the fixed stars as 
we call them — is so far away that light, traveling 186,000 miles 
a second, requires more than four years to reach us. This is the 
star called Alpha Centauri. ‘ 
_ Astronomers have estimated the total size of Our Universe and 
they think that its diameter is such that it would require fifty 
thousand years for light to travel across it, representing perhaps 
two hundred thousand trillion miles. Some, indeed, would mul- © 
tiply these numbers by five or six. But the inquiring human 
mind leaps beyond even these colossal distances and asks what is 
outside this total immense cluster of stars making up our Galac- 
tic System. Astronomers are not at present able to answer this 
question. It is certainly possible that in the remote depths of 
Space there may be other universes like ours. It has even been 
suggested that the spiral nebulz which our instruments discern 
-are such distant universes. ‘Our Solar System is one among 
countless others of the Milky Way; and perhaps the Milky Way 
is but one of countless giant nebule whirling in spiral form 
through a space that may be infinite.”’ + But about the spiral 
nebulz astronomers are not agreed and their meaning remains 
at present doubtful. 

These fabulous distances do not affect us very much, but they 
suggest the great emptiness of Space, for even in our little compact 
Solar System we see how small is the size of the Sun and the plan- 
ets as compared with their distances apart. And when we speak 
of the emptiness of the Universe, we are reminded of the empti- 
ness of the atom, the unit of matter in our own surroundings; 
for we learn that the atomic units, the electrons, are supposed 

1 From an article by Archibald Henderson, ‘‘The Size of the Universe,” in 
Science, September 7, 1923. 

From the Harvard College Observatory there has recently been reported a 


group of stars and nebule, N.G.C. 6822, probably quite outside the Galactic 
System and at least a million light years away. 


62 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


to be as far apart relatively to their size as are the Sun and the 
planets. 


Space 

Whether, therefore, we think of the emptiness of matter or the 
emptiness of the heavens, or whether we let our minds wander 
out to those distant nebulz, the question, What is Space? forces 
itself upon us. From Aristotle to Einstein this space problem 
has puzzled both scientists and philosophers. 

Commonly we think of Space as a great void, in which, how- 
ever, bodies may exist and through which they move. We 
think of it as extending in all directions and as having no limits, 
hence infinite. The heavenly bodies move through it, and if 
they moved in a straight line could go on forever. Science some- 
times speaks of it as filled with the ether. It seems to exist in 
three dimensions, right and left, up and down, forward and back- 
ward. Itseems to be infinitely divisible, since any portion of it 
could be divided into two portions, and so on forever. Further- 
more, Space, as we think, is not dependent upon the bodies in it 
and would continue to exist if all such bodies were destroyed, like 
a kind of immense receptacle or, shall we say, a great emptiness. 
Think of an empty box with six sides; then let the sides expand, 
move away into the distance and disappear. This is Space. 

But when we begin to reflect upon the Space idea, all this seems 
less certain. We find that empirical Space — that is, the Space of 
our actual experience — is something quite different. To try to 
understand just what Space is, let us start with the simple facts 
of sensory experience. If I take a pair of compasses and touch the 
back of your hand, you get a perception of two steel points. But 
you get more than this: you get the perception of a certain rela- 
tion between them, a relation which you call distance or position. 
There is evidently a.unique kind of relationship between the two 
perceived points, and this relationship of distance or position is 
perceived just as much as the points themselves are perceived. 
If a silver dollar is placed upon the back of the hand, it is not per- 
ceived merely as something heavy and cold, it is perceived as 
something spread out, or extended. Likewise the sense of sight 


THE COSMOS 63 


gives us, besides color and light, the spread-out or extended 
quality of objects, their voluminousness. From our various 
senses, therefore, we get immediate perception of certain rela- 
tions between objects, which we call spatial relations, and these 
seem to be of three classes, which we describe as right and 
left, up and down, forward and backward. ‘Thus perceptual 
Space is said to have three dimensions. 

It would be possible, of course, to say that the spread-outness 
of objects, their extensity, is not really any external reality at all, 
but a peculiarity of the mind, a special form of our sensibility. 
This view was held by the great philosopher, Kant, and in this 
opinion he has been followed by many other thinkers. Never- 
theless, it is probably an incorrect view, and we may believe that 
not only are objects of experience real, but that Space itself is 
objectively real. But the reality of Space, when reduced to the 
final analysis, is found in a certain kind of relationship between 
bodies, namely, the relations of position, distance, and direction. 
The student of philosophy, therefore, who is confused by the 
strangeness of Space and the difficulty of understanding it, may 
think at first only of position, distance, and direction, and may 
consider Space as merely the name for all such relations as these; 
but he may think of these relations as real and, therefore, of 
Space as real. 


Conceptual Space 

Having thus considered Space as meaning the real objective 
position, distance, and direction of objects, we may now goastep 
further and distinguish another slightly different meaning of the 
word, as it is used in both philosophy and mathematics. Some- 
times this is called conceptual Space, as distinguished from per- 
ceptual or sensational Space, as described above. We have been 
speaking of the Space which we perceive, but now the Space 
that we think about is a little different. The Space that we think 
about, conceptual Space, is not simply the perceived relations be- 
tween objects; it is a kind of plan of all possible relations of this 
kind. We perceive the eight corners of the room in which we 
are working, and at the same time we perceive the relations 


64 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


among these eight corners —and this is actual perceived Space. 
But now in imagination we think of other rooms above this, one 
upon another, and so we picture a world of ideal Space extending 
indefinitely in every direction. This is conceptual Space, and it 
seems to us like a void or receptacle; and it seems infinite in ex- 
tent, which means nothing more than that we cannot think of 
any limit to these possible spatial relations. Conceptual Space 
thus appears to be a construction of the mind, and to lack that 
kind of reality which is possessed by the Space of our per- 
ception. 


Mathematical Space 

Now, it is this conceptual Space which is the Space of mathe- 
matics, only mathematicians ascribe to it certain qualities which 
even the conceptual Space of the plain man certainly does not 
have. Euclidean Space, for instance, is infinite, homogeneous, 
continuous, isotropic, and is in three dimensions, a conception re- 
sulting from the complete abstraction from the qualities of sensu- 
ous perception except in extension in three dimensions. Math- 
ematics thus deals with ideal Space, which of course is based upon 
real or perceptual Space, but goes far beyond it. Mathematical 
Space is thus a construct, like the points, lines, and surfaces 
constituting the basis of the science of geometry. This does not 
mean that points, lines, and surfaces are fictions, or even purely 
mental things, or mental creations. They are real in their own 
way, but not as sensible particulars. When we say, therefore, as 
is now customary, that mathematics is not an existential science, 
but rests upon certain assumptions such as axioms and defini- 
tions, this statement is liable to be misinterpreted. The fact 
that geometry gives us results which fit the physical world in 
which we live reveals a closer connection with “reality” than 
might be inferred from its purely logical character. 


Time 

Now, there is another kind of relation existing in our experi- 
ence than the relation of extension, which as we have seen gives 
us the experience of right and left, up and down, far and near, — 


THE COSMOS 65 


We have also the experience of before and after, or succession. 
This we call Time. Suppose, again, that the two steel points of 
the compasses be placed upon your hand. You have, in addition 
to the touch and temperature sensations, the experience of ex- 
tension. Suppose, now, that the same points be presently laid 
again upon precisely the same parts of the hand; you have now 
an additional experience of after or later. That peculiar kind of 
relation which we call before and after, or the relation of succes- 
sion, is thus also a unique kind of experience, and to this we give 
the name Time. Itis the relation, not of spatial coexistence, but 
of temporal succession, and has, not three dimensions like Space, 
but only one. 

Time seems to flow on like a stream, and in this stream we dis- 
tinguish three parts, which we call the present, the past, and the 
future, the present being real in experience, the past constructed 
in memory, and the future anticipated in imagination. The 
present, however, as James has shown, is not a ‘‘knife-edge,”’ or 
instant; it actually has a certain duration. In thismoment of du- 
ration there is, indeed, a before and after; but, for the most part, 
our before and after, our yesterday and to-morrow, are ideal con- 
structions like conceptual Space. Conceptual Time, again, is a 
little different from perceptual Time. It is the abstract Time we 
think about. In thisideal Time the present is a knife-edge, hav- 
ing no duration, or zero duration — and the past and future 
stretch away to infinity. | 


Space-Time 

Now, I fear that some of us will not be satisfied with this ‘‘em- 
pirical” description of Space and Time. The notion of an abso- 
lute Space, infinite in all directions, in which things exist and 
move, and the notion of an absolute Time which will go on forever 
and had no beginning, seems more natural and comforting. In- 
deed, Newton himself believed in such an absolute Space and 
Time, and only recently have they been questioned. It is prob- 
ably what the words Space and Time mean to most of us, and 
certainly we have no right to say dogmatically that nothing cor- 
> responding to this meaning exists. 


66 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


In fact, at the present time there is a whole school of investiga- 
tors trying to find out what the reality is which in some way cor- 
responds to conceptual Space and Time. Einstein in Germany, 
Eddington, 8. Alexander, and C. D. Broad in England, and 
many other collaborators have begun peering into this obscure 
region of reality. And the interesting thing about these studies 
is that they are no longer pursued as psychological problems, but 
as problems in physics and mathematics. We are in search of 
the actual objective entity, which, so to speak, is the mother of 
Space and Time. 

The first result of these profound and mathematically rather 
intricate researches has been to show that Space and Time are 
themselves more closely related to each other than we supposed. 
Or perhaps Space, Time, and Matter, all three, may have a com- 
mon matrix. Even starting with our own experience, what we 
seem to have is not Space and Time as separate elements in expe- 
rience, but rather four sets of relations, namely, up and down, 
right and left, forward and backward, and before and after. All 
events are space-events and all points in Space are point-events. 
It has been suggested, therefore, that the reality which we seek is 
neither Space nor Time but Space-Time; and that which really 
exists is not Space with three dimensions and Time with one, but 
Space-Time with four dimensions. 

Now four-dimensional being is hard for us to understand, but 
mathematically it presents no serious difficulty. Take a lead 
pencil and lay it ona table. If we consider it as representing a 
line, it has one dimension, which we call near and far. Now, 
take a second pencil and lay it on the table at right angles to the 
first. We have now two dimensions, near and far, and right and 
left, determining a surface. Now, take a third pencil and place it 
at right angles to the other two. It will stand upright on the ta- 
ble. We have now three dimensions, determining a solid. Now, 
take a fourth pencil and try to place it at right angles to all the 
others. This we shall find impossible to do; nor can we think of 
such a figure. This is because the physical world in which we 
live, and to which our bodies belong, is the three-dimensional 
world of Space. But it does not follow from the fact that we can- 


THE COSMOS 67 


not picture a four-dimensional reality, or build it up with pen- 
cils, that such a reality may not exist. 

Not only do mathematicians feel quite at home dealing with 
the fourth dimension, but even we ourselves find three dimen- 
sions insufficient as soon as we cease speaking of points in Space 
and begin speaking of events in Space. Such events require four 
dimensions to determine them. Suppose it is a case of an acci- 
dent which happened in New York City. If I say it happened 
on Broadway (one dimension), you will ask where on Broadway. 
When I say that it happened at the corner of Broadway and 
Ninety-Sixth Street (two dimensions), you will ask whether it 
happened on the surface streets or in the Subway. When I say 
that it happened in the Subway at that intersection (three di- 
mensions), you will ask when it happened. If I reply that it hap- 
pened in the Subway at that intersection on Tuesday noon (four 
dimensions), then the event is fully determined.! 

The theory that Time is the fourth dimension of Space, or 
more strictly that the world in which we live is a four-dimen- 
sional space-time continuum, was first proposed by Minkowski, 
but more fully elaborated by Einstein. 

The non-mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he 
hears of “four-dimensional” things, by a feeling not unlike that awak- 
ened by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more commonplace 


statement than that the world in which we live is a four-dimensional 
space-time continuum.? 


Instead, therefore, of thinking of an ‘‘absolute”? Newtonian 
Space of three dimensions, and an independent Time of one di- 
mension, it is possible to think of an original “‘space-time mani- 
fold” of four dimensions, in which Time is the fourth dimension. 
At this point, however, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity 
passes beyond the mere solution of the problem of Space and 
Time and approaches a metaphysical theory of reality; for it sup- 
poses that the space-time continuum is, so to speak, the ultimate 
physical reality of the Universe. If this be true, it immediately 


1 Compare Edwin E. Slossgn, Easy Lessons in Einstein, p. 31. 
2 Albert Einstein, Relativity, translated by Robert W. Lawson (Henry Holt 
and Company), p. 65. 


68 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


becomes of great interest to the student of philosophy; for it ap- 
pears that it can be shown mathematically that such a four- 
dimensional manifold under the relativity theory is not a homo- 
geneous affair, but tends to inequalities, or ‘‘singularities,” and, 
so it is said, such singularities are what we call matter. Matter, as 
it were, is a kind of kink in the time-space manifold, and where 
these kinks occur, Space is warped or distorted. 

This makes it possible for Einstein to offer a wholly new theory 
of Gravitation, throwing new and needed light on this obscure 
subject. We remember that Newton formulated the law of 
Gravitation, telling us how all material bodies tend to move to- 
ward one another, the stone to the earth, and the earth to the 
sun; but he did not tell us why they behave in this way. We 
have usually thought of Gravitation as a kind of force ‘‘ pulling” 
bodies together. But no one knows about any such force, nor 
how it could “pull” things together; hence it is of great interest 
to learn from Einstein and Eddington that it may be possible to 
explain Gravitation in a simpler way by the supposition that it is 
due to the nature of Space itself; that Space is distorted or puck- 
ered or curved in the region of masses of matter, and that the 
behavior of any particle when it enters this gravitational field is 
due, not to any mysterious ‘‘force,”’ but to the puckered charac- 
ter of Space in such a field, which determines the path of the par- 
ticle. 

But we need not trouble ourselves further at present about 
Gravitation, but keep to our task of trying to understand some- 
thing about Space and Time; and lest what we have said about 
them may appear confusing, let us state it again in a very simple’ 
way. 

We think about Space and Time as being independent and ab- 
solute things, Space being a kind of infinite emptiness, like an im- 
mense box without sides, and Time a stream flowing eternally on. 
But we do not know that any such absolute Space and Time ex- 
ist, for all we get in actual experience is just a set of relations, for- 
ward and back, right and left, up and down, before and after. | 

But, behold, just as we were giving up our belief in any real or’ 
absolute Space and Time, come eminent and profound mathema- 


THE COSMOS 69 


ticians and physicists, who tell us that there may be after all 
something which is real and objective, and, as it were, absolute; 
only that it is not either Space or Time, but a kind of union of 
them called Space-Time having four dimensions, of which time 
is the fourth. 

And then, finally, to add to the marvel, we are told that per- 
haps not only are Space and Time very much interwoven with 
each other, but Space, Time, and Matter are all parts or aspects 
of the same primeval reality, matter being, so to speak, spots or 
irregularities or hummocks or kinks in the space-time continuum. 
Later in this book we shall be studying theories of reality, and we 
shall find that one of these theories is called materialism, which 
teaches that matter is the ultimate reality and that mind is a func- 
tion of matter. But already we begin to see how reality goes far 
beyond matter. Indeed, the theory of relativity seems to teach 
that Space, Time, and Matter are merely interesting or compre- 
hensible aspects of reality, which the mind as it were seizes upon. 
The theory of relativity would appear to lead in the direction of 
an idealistic view of the world, at least according to the interpre- 
tation of Eddington and Carr.? More accurately, I think, it 
- leads in the direction of a dualism, since there must be conscious- 
ness-reality intersecting the space-time reality along the time 
axis.2 Otherwise the Universe would be wholly unillumined. 

But Einstein and Eddington are not the only ones who have 
taught us recently that Space-Time is a kind of primeval reality, 
from which everything comes. A very interesting theory is that 
of S. Alexander,‘ which is different from that of Einstein and per- 
haps less difficult to understand. Space-Time is the fundamen- 
tal reality of the world, the matrix stuff, from which grow or 
emerge all possible qualities. And, in particular, Time is the 


1‘ The views of Time and Space, which I have set forth, have their foundation 
in experimental physics. Therein is their strength. Their tendency is revolu- 
tionary. From henceforth space in itself and time in itself sink to mere shadows, 
and only a kind of union of the two preserves an independent existence.’’ — 
H. Minkowski, quoted by Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, p. 30. 

2See Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, p. 200, and H. Wildon Carr, 
The General Principle of Relativity, pp. 161-62. 

8See the article by T. B. Robertson, ‘“‘Consciousness and the Sense of 
Time,” Scientific Monthly, June, 1923. 

4See his two books, Space, Time, and Deity, and Spinoza and Time, 


70 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


principle of motion and change. Time is a kind of ‘‘cosmic genx 
darme,’’ who says, ‘‘ Circulez, Messieurs.”’ ‘Time is to Space what 
mind is to body. It appears to be the moving cause of the world. 
‘Soul is the source of movement.” ! 

Perhaps this view will seem even stranger to us, the view, 
namely, that Space-Time is the ultimate stuff of the world and 
that furthermore Time is to Space what the mind is to the body. 
But I think that what Alexander means is that there is a funda- 
mental duality in things, and that one face or part of this duality . 
is the energizing, moving cause. If he had said that in the be- 
ginning was the World and in the World was the world-soul, 
which was its moving spirit, the thought would be much the 
same, but the language more familiar. 


Bergson’s theory of Time 

Alexander’s theory of Time reminds us somewhat of Berg- 
son’s view. Just as the word Space has a deeper significance to 
Alexander and to the Relativists, so the word Time has in the 
philosophy of Bergson a profound and peculiar meaning. Berg- 
son prefers the word Duration — ‘‘durée’? — and he means by 
it something else than clock-time, which is an outer measure 
of our experience of succession. Duration is of the very na- 
ture of reality itself, and this is almost synonymous with life, and 
life with consciousness. It is a kind of artificial world that 
science and intellect have to do with, a space-world of simul- 
taneities and externalities. The world of deeper reality is that 
of change, of duration, of creative evolution, of the ceaselessly 
new and different, of endless heterogeneity. ‘Pure duration is 
the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes 
when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its 
present state from its former states.” ? 

Now, it is very true that, when we separate pure duration from 
every notion of simultaneity, or before and after, and think of it 
as pure change, becoming, growth, it is almost synonymous with 
life and creative activity. Perhaps no richer notion has been in- 


1See Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 11, p. 48. 
2 Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 100. 


THE COSMOS 71 


troduced into philosophy than this one of Bergson, the notion of 
pure duration. Yetit is not what you and I mean by Time, for 
in our experience Time is always spatial, as it were. It is meas- 
ured duration. It suggests a picture of the present as compared 
with the past and future. Would it not simplify our philoso- 
phy to use the word T%me in its ordinary meaning, and reserve 
for the larger notion some other word, such as growth, progress, 
evolution, change ? 


The Ether 

It remains now to speak of that mysterious thing called the 
Ether, which fills Space; for we should like to know whether 
there is any such thing and, if so, just what it is. It has long 
been known that light travels through Space at a measurable rate 
of speed, namely, 186,000 miles a second. Since it did not seem 
possible that light is composed of particles which actually travel 
through Space at that rate, it was concluded that light was due to 
wave motion. We know how waves in water move on, although 
the drops of water move up and down. 

When the undulatory theory of light came upon the scene, it 
was necessary to have some medium for the transmission of the 
waves, something to undulate. It was assumed, therefore, that 
the whole Universe is filled with a stationary medium called 
Ether, and that light waves were waves in this Ether. To serve 
its purpose such a medium must have certain qualities. It must 
be frictionless, it must be solid, it must be incompressible, it 
must be immovable, it must admit of strains and stresses. 
These attributes, however, involve some contradictions. Such 
a medium could hardly exist; and yet some such medium there 
must be. 

When the electro-magnetic theory of light was proposed by 
Maxwell, a whole series of phenomena was unified. It was a 
great discovery to learn that light and heat and electrical 
phenomena and the infinitesimal X-rays and the long wireless 
rays were all alike, except in length, having the same rate of pro- 
pagation and being subject to the same laws. But the Ether as 
a medium for all these waves was more indispensable than ever, 


72 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


and yet the Ether itself was a bundle of contradictions. It was 
nothing but the substantive of the verb ‘“‘to undulate”’; and fi- 
nally it has been said to have no qualities at all except extension 
in three dimensions, being thus equivalent to Space. 

Some years ago Michelson and Morley carried out a celebrated 
experiment to determine whether the Earth is moving through a 
stationary medium, such as Ether. Since the Earth is moving 
about nineteen miles a second in its path around the Sun, if there - 
is a stationary Ether through which it is ploughing, this would 
cause an ether wind, or ether drift, on the surface of the Earth. 
Since now, by hypothesis, light is caused by the wave motion of 
the Ether, it is evident that it would take longer to send a ray of 
light a given distance forward against this ether wind than it 
would to send it backward with it, Just asit would take longer to 
send your voice against the wind than backward with it; and it 
would take longer to send a ray of light forward and back a given 
distance than it would to send it out at right angles to the line of 
flight the same distance and back.!' The latter could be tested 
by means of a delicate instrument devised by Michelson and 
Morley, but the results were wholly negative. Light was found 
to travel in all directions at the same rate. At first sight these 
strange results would seem to disprove the existence of the Ether, 
but presently it was learned from the principle of relativity that 
even if there were an Ether, it would be impossible to detect 
our motion through it. So the problem remained unsolved. In 
general physicists are placing less and less emphasis upon the 
Ether and one hears less about it than formerly, but perhaps only 
because we hear more about Space than formerly. If we accept 
the undulatory theory of light, some interstellar medium there 
must be by which light comes to us from the distant stars; and 
when we study the material atom and discover that its constitu- 
ent electrons are very far apart, we seem to need some medium of 
interaction between the parts. If Einstein and his fellow work- 

1 A swimmer knows that it is easier to swim across a stream of a given width 
having a current of a given velocity and back to his starting-point than to swim 
the same distance upstream and back to the point of starting, even though he 


has never tried to show the reason for this mathematically. See Eddington, 
Space, Time, and Gravitation, chap. I. 


THE COSMOS 13 


ers are able to dispense with the Ether, it 1s only because Space 
has taken its place. 


The origin of the Earth 

~ But we must return from these cosmical speculations to the 
Earth upon which we live; for we wish to study the course of evo- 
lution on our planet and the final appearance of man with his 
wonderful mind and his capacities for knowledge. Concerning 
the origin of the Earth and the other planets, there have been two 
theories, neither of which is now considered wholly satisfactory. 
The older theory, proposed first by Kant and elaborated by La- 
place, is called the Nebular Hypothesis. In cosmic space the tele- 
‘scope and spectroscope reveal many nebulae. These incandes- 
cent gaseous masses pass through regular stages of evolution. 
Cooling, they contract and throw off rings. These rings, again 
cooling, contracting, and breaking, form planets revolving 
around the central mass, as the mass itself originally revolved. 
Ultimately the gaseous center becomes the Sun, around which 
revolve the cooling planets. The Earth has advanced to such a 
stage that its stable crust and its separated earth and water make 
living forms possible. Both planets and central sun will ulti- 
mately become cold and dead, a single mass, a dark star. The 
theory may be further enlarged by supposing that in the course 
of xons of time this dark star will collide with some other hea- 
venly body, reducing all again to the nebular form, when the 
process will be repeated. This theory encounters many serious 
difficulties. 

According to the second, the planetestmal hypothesis, proposed 
by Chamberlin and Moulton of the University of Chicago, the 
original nebula is a spiral composed of innumerable small and 
cold bodies, called planetesimals, or minute planets, or meteor- 
ites. Really, therefore, our planets are ‘‘aggregations of mete- 
oric dust,” drawn together by gravity. The Earth was thus 
never hotter than it is now, but at first was small and has grown 
by drawing to itself the swarms of meteorites in surrounding 
space. 

If this planetesimal theory is nearer to the truth, we need no 
longer be disturbed by gloomy pictures of the Earth becoming 


74 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


cold and uninhabitable. Anatole France in his book called Pen- 
guin Island draws such a picture of a freezing globe. We see in 
imagination the last forlorn man shivering over a pile of dying 
embers and the disappearance, with him, of all lifeand hope. In 
view of our later knowledge, however, we may say, ‘‘Cheer up, it 
may never happen!”’ Our recent understanding of radio-activ- 
ity has given us a new conception of the sources of energy in the © 
Sun. If, as is now believed, there has been an approximately 
constant radiation of solar heat during hundreds of millions of 
years, we need not worry about the future. Cosmic disasters 
are no doubt “frequent” in the Galactic System, but our Sun 
with its family of planets seems to be moving in a very safe and 
uneventful region of Space.? 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Roy Wood Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism (Open Court Publishing 


Company), chaps. Vv, VI. 


Further references: 

Joseph Alexander Leighton, Man and the Cosmos (D. Appleton and Com- 
pany), chap. XVIII. 

S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (The Macmillan Company), book 1. 

C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (Harcourt, Brace and Company), espe- 
cially chaps. 1, 1, and xu. 

Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity. (Princeton University 
Press.) 

A. 8. Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation. An outline of the General 
Relativity Theory. (Cambridge University Press.) The most author- 
itative book in English on the subject. 

J. Malcolm Bird, editor, Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Gravitation. 
A selection of material from essays submitted in the competition for the 
Eugene Higgins Prize of $5000. (Scientific American Publishing Com- 
pany.) 

A. N. Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Phys- 
ical Science (Cambridge University Press), chap. u, ‘The Related- 
ness of Nature.” 

Alfred Russel Wallace, Man’s Place in the Universe. (Doubleday, Page 
and Company.) 

H. Wildon Carr, The General Principle of Relativity in Its Philosophical 
and Historical Aspects. (The Macmillan Company.) 


1 Compare Dr. Harlow Shapley, The Galactic System, p. 21. Adapted from an 
address before the British Astronomical Association, May 31, 1922. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 


The origin of life 

THE origin of life on the Earth’s surface has become a very in- 
teresting and serious question since the discovery that all living 
germs come from other living germs. The Roman poet, Lucre- 
tius, in his book, De Rerum Natura, solved the difficulty very eas- 
ily, as did others of the ancients, by the theory of spontaneous 
generation. Clods of earth, he said, when warm and wet, soon 
_ bring forth living forms. In modern times, also, it was at first 
thought that spontaneous generation could be demonstrated in a 
test tube. If you take a little water from a pond and expose it to 
light and warmth, it will soon swarm with living things. If, now, 
you first sterilize it by the application of heat and again expose it 
to light and warmth, it will still after some time show evidences 
of life. If, however, you repeat the experiment, taking the pre- 
caution to close your test tube with a little wool cotton, so as to 
exclude the living germs which may be floating in the air, no life 
can be made to appear. So the controversy of the nineteenth 
century over spontaneous generation ended; and under the lead- 
ership of Pasteur a new and fruitful science was born, the science 
of bacteriology, with its wonderful contributions to our know- 
ledge of germ diseases and to the arts of sanitation, aseptic sur- 
gery, and even agriculture. 

Incidentally, we see again how results of great practical benefit 
flow from purely theoretical investigations. These investigators 
were not working in the interests of applied science, searching for 
new knowledge of disease and its cure. They were scientists, 
seeking knowledge for its own sake. 

But now it is in the same mood of wonder and desire to know 
that we ask, Where, then, did the first living germs come from on 
our planet? Since there was a time when conditions were such 
on the Earth that no life was possible, while now its whole sur- 
face swarms with living beings, we wonder how the first living 


76 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


germ arose. Omne vivum ex ovo, says the biologist — all life comes 
from an egg. Given, perhaps, one germ cell, through evolution 
we can people the Earth. But whence came the first one? If 
you have a hen, you can get anegg. Ifyou have an egg, you can 
get a hen. But if you have neither, what will you do? 

As regards the first appearance of living things upon the ~ 
Earth, there are three traditional views: (1) The first germs of 
life may have come to the Earth from some other planet, travel- 
ing through space. (2) Life came to Earth by the creative act of 
the divine will. God created life upon the Earth. (8) Life arose 
upon the Earth by a natural process, being slowly evolved from 
inorganic matter. 

Concerning the first of these three theories — theoretically it is 
not impossible that life should be transported through space 
from some other planet or star, either as ultra-microscopic living 
germs driven by light radiation, as was proposed by Arrhenius,! or 
hidden in the cleft of some meteorite dropped upon the Earth’s 
surface. Eminent scientists have proposed this solution of the 
problem. But it does not really solve the problem; it merely 
transfers it to another world. And the view seems unnecessary. 

The second proposal, that life is the result of a divine creative 
act, depends for its value on the way it is interpreted. Our im- 
pulse would be to think of God at some moment of time and some 
point in space issuing a decree or fiat, creating life. As thus in- 
terpreted, this solution of the problem would not appeal to scien- 
tists, who are accustomed to look for order and continuity in all 
the work of nature. If, however, we think of God as the creative 
agency, or the Creative Will, continually at work throughout 
nature, this view might commend itself as the best of the 
three. 

The third theory, that of the gradual evolution of the organic 
from the inorganic, is the one generally accepted by biologists to- 
day. Although there is as yet no undisputed evidence of any 
generation of the organic from the inorganic, and although our 
laboratory experiments seem to indicate unequivocally that all 


1See The Life of the Universe, by Svante Arrhenius. Translated into English 
by H. Borns, vol. 1, chap. 1x, pp. 250 ff. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE Me) 


life proceeds from previous life, yet it does not follow that condi- 
tions may not have been such at some time, or at some times, 
that life could arise from non-life. One cannot say that in the 
warm terrestrial waters millions of years ago the organic could 
not have been evolved by natural processes from the inorganic. 
We are almost compelled to believe that just this did happen. It 
may have happened once; it may possibly be taking place daily 
somewhere now. 

It seems, then, that we cannot look for the origin of life either 
in interstellar migration, a divine creative act, or in spontaneous 
generation. It is more in accordance with the thought of the 
day to believe that life originated in some process of evolution, 

which means slow, orderly, progressive change. But when in the 

course of evolution some novelty appears, unique, decisively dif- 
ferent, representing a higher level, showing new and hitherto un- 
known qualities, escaping perhaps from the mechanistic tread- 
mill of the ages, it is legitimate to use the word created. By 
some kind of creative process, therefore, life came to Earth — 
let us say by creative evolution. We have to thank M. Bergson 
for this enlightening phrase. Every student should read his 
masterly book, Creatwe Evolution. 


The nature of life 

If, as we must believe, every form of life — plant, animal, 
man, with all that the latter term implies of the human mind, 
human history, human institutions, even art and science — has 
arisen by a process which we call evolution from very early and 
simple forms of life -— say from unicellular organisms — it be- 
comes of the utmost importance to the student of philosophy to° 
understand not only the origin but the meaning of life itself. 

The key to the problem of life is found in that magic word, 
organization. A living body is an organism, and the peculiar fea- 
ture of a living organism is the possession of a group of unique 
properties, of which the two most conspicuous are irritability and 
reproduction. Living organisms are responsive to stimuli and 
they have the power of self-perpetuation. But organic bodies 
possess also other distinctive properties, such as growth by the 


78 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


assimilation of food, adaptation and self-adjustment to the envi- 
ronment, self-maintenance, and self-protection. 

The above properties are possessed by all living organisms, but 
when the organization proceeds further and we arrive at very 
complex and highly integrated living bodies, still other proper- . 
ties appear, such as sensibility, instinct, selective choice, mem- 
ory, intelligence, and consciousness. ‘To the sum of the first set 
of properties we may give the name Life; to the sum of all 
these properties we may give the names, Jafe and Mind. 

The biologist and the psychologist, now, will be satisfied to 
study the behavior of these organisms and to describe, classify, 
and relate all their peculiar properties. But not so the student 
of philosophy. He must inquire more about the very nature of 
Life and Mind, how and why they arise, and whether they are 
new kinds of reality, or whether they are merely combinations of 
the simpler forms found in the inorganic world. In the latter we 
have atoms and molecules, and molecules are combined into nu- 
merous chemical compounds according to certain peculiar affini- 
ties. But how and why do the chemical compounds get ‘ organ- 
ized”’ into living bodies, and how do all those wonderful proper- 
ties, such as reproduction and self-maintenance, arise? Isit due 
to some vital principle that has been added to inorganic com- 
pounds? Is life a kind of entity, which exists in addition to the 
atoms and molecules, or is it just a function of atoms and mole- 
cules, or is it a function of a certain form or structure which atoms 
and molecules take on? - 

It has been held many times in the history of philosophy 
that life is due to a vital principle, a special factor, which is to be 
distinguished sharply from all forms of mere matter and from all 
mechanical forces. The name Vitalism has been given to this 
view. Something like this was held by Aristotle and is held by 
eminent biologists at the present day. But on the other hand 
many thinkers in all the centuries and many biologists both 
of the past and of the present, strenuously deny the existence of 
any such thing as a vital principle, or special life force, and be- 
lieve that life is due to the action of ordinary physical and chemi- 
cal forces. To this view we usually give the name Mecha- 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 79 


nism. It is closely related to that theory of the world which we 
have learned to know as Naturalism. 


Mechanism 

Mechanism stresses the purely mechanical character of all pro- 
cesses, organic as well as inorganic. In explaining life, whether 
of micro-organisms, plants, animals, or man, it is necessary to as- 
sume no other materials and no other forces than those exhibited 
in inorganic nature, as, for instance, in the movement of the 
spheres or the formation of rocks and soils or of chemical com- 
pounds. Physical and chemical laws are sufficient to account 
for all forms of life and perhaps even of mind. They can all be 
described in terms of matter and motion. They are all, in the 
last analysis, movements of mass particles in space. ‘The so-called 
higher forms are distinguished by greater complexity of struc- 
ture, but they involve no new materials and no new forces. The 
human body with its marvelous brain and nervous system, as 
well as the whole kingdom of plants and animals, can be analyzed 
into the same carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and 
other chemical elements, as the soil, the rocks, and the water. 
Nor are any other forces at work in them than are present in the 
inorganic bodies. “A living organism is a complex system of 
physical-chemical mechanisms.”’ Continuity prevails in nature 
from the simplest to the most complex forms. There is no sharp 
line of cleavage between the organic and the inorganic. In the 
chemically complex inorganic colloids we have an easy stepping- 
stone to the organic colloids and thence to higher forms of life. 

It is not necessary, according to this view, to assume any mys- 
terious vital forces to account for life, nor is it necessary to sup- 
pose that evolution is purposive or teleological. We should not 
gratuitously import into the processes of nature any mental con- 
cepts, or spiritual or psychic forces, or any notions of ends, pur- 
poses, or values. Thus the world scheme is immensely simplified. 


History of Mechanism 
Historically this world-view originated with Democritus in the 
fifth century B.c. It received encouragement through the work 


80 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. It was ampli- 
fied in Herbert Spencer’s law of evolution, expressing the man- 
ner of the redistribution of matter and motion. It was immeas- 
urably strengthened by Darwin’s discovery of the law of natural 
selection, explaining the origin of new animal species. It found 
a vigorous defender in Huxley, in his Physical Basis of Life. 
In this century it was expounded by Professor Loeb, in his 
Mechanistic Conception of Life. It is the view adopted by many 
biologists at the present time, as a working hypothesis — by no 
means regarded as a final philosophy. In accordance with the 
law of parsimony,! they do not wish to assume other forces than 
physical and chemical ones, unless such other forces should prove 
to be necessary. It is a direct violation of this law, it is claimed, 
when the vitalists affirm the presence of a vital force to explain 
life, a procedure ridiculed by Moliére, who compared it with the 
attempt to explain the sleep-producing effect of opium by the 
circular argument that opium possesses a “dormitive property.” 
It is just this tendency to explain things by words that has been 
the bane of philosophy from the beginning. Goethe says: 


Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen 
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein. 


Difficulties 

At first sight the mechanistic explanation of life seems quite 
convincing. Certain rather serious objections have been urged 
against it, however, which we must now consider. If these ob- 
jections seem to offer almost insuperable difficulties to the ac- 
ceptance of a mechanistic interpretation of life, we must not 
hastily infer that a vitalistic interpretation will offer fewer diffi- 
culties. Possibly we may be able to get down below both of 
these theories and find some common ground for a reconciliation. 

The first difficulty that we encounter is that when we try 


1The law of parsimony was first formulated in the fourteenth century by the 
scholastic philosopher, William of Occam. ‘The Latin form of the law reads: 
““Eintia non sunt multiplicanda preter necessitatem’’ — Entities, principles, or 
forces should not be multiplied beyond necessity. This has been called Occam’s 
razor, lopping off the heads of many unnecessary scholastic principles or hy- 
potheses. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 81 


to explain life, growth, reproduction, mind, morals, society, and, 
indeed, the very fact of evolution itself, by means of a few con- 
cepts found useful in physical and chemical science, we are in 
danger of importing into these concepts a wealth of meaning 
which they do not have in their respective spheres. 

The number of concepts which we find at our disposal from the 
physical sciences is very limited, while the realities to be ex- 
plained are very intricate. The concepts which we have at hand 
are such as cause and effect (interpreted either as mechanical 
equivalence or as mere sequence), mass particles in motion, ac- 
tion and reaction, the reaction being quantitatively determined 
by the impact of material particles. Strictly it would seem that 
we cannot even speak of attraction and repulsion. These are 
figurative terms imported from the world of mind. 

These mechanical concepts, now, seem a wholly inadequate 
equipment for the interpretation of the rich content of life. 
They are the concepts which we have found useful in describing 
the behavior of material bodies. It is not quite clear why we 
must be limited to these concepts in describing the phenomena 
of life and mind and society. It is not even clear how we shall 
explain or even describe the fact of evolution itself by means of 
them. 

Herbert Spencer defines life as “the continuous adjustment of 
internal to external conditions.” It seems difficult to explain 
life mechanistically on this definition; and whether this is a suffi- 
cient definition or not, the power of adjustment indubitably be- 
longs to life. Life is self-adjusting, self-maintaining, self-pre- 
serving, and self-perpetuating. There is nothing like this in the 
mechanical world. Machines do not adjust, maintain, preserve, 
or perpetuate themselves. Mechanistic philosophers are very 
fond of considering certain concepts, such as matter, motion, en- 
ergy, ether, electricity, as ultimate. They enable us to describe 
quantitatively many phenomena in the physical world. But 
there are certain other concepts, such as life and mind and strug- 
gle and will and impulse and appetency and purpose and «interest 
and value and creative evolution, which are equally useful in ex- 
plaining other great areas of existence, and apparently indis- 


82 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


pensable in explaining them. It seems a little like dogmatism 
to say that we must not consider these, or some of them, as 
ultimate, but that we must reduce them to the other list of 
mechanistic concepts. The interests of parsimony should not 
cause us to neglect essential elementary principles, nor, if we 
wish to reduce the number of primary concepts, is it certain 
that we should sacrifice the vitalistic concepts rather than the 
mechanistic ones. 

I think there is a marked tendency at the present time to ques- 
tion the assumption, so common at the close of the nineteenth 
century, that the concepts of physics and chemistry have any pe- 
culiar prerogative in explaining life and man and mind. Indeed, 
J. S. Haldane, the English physiologist, directly reverses this or- 
der.! “The idea of the physical universe,” he says, “‘as a world 
of self-existent matter and energy is only a temporary working 
hypothesis by means of which we are able to introduce a certain 
amount of order and coherence into a large part of our experi- 
ence.” ‘This hypothesis breaks down in connection with the 
phenomena of life.”” ‘The phenomena of life involve another 
and radically different conception of reality.”’ ‘‘The idea of life 
is nearer to reality than the ideas of matter and energy, and 
therefore the presupposition of ideal biology is that inorganic can 
ultimately be resolved into organic phenomena, and that the 
physical world is thus only the appearance of a deeper reality 
which is as yet hidden from our distinct vision, and can only be 
seen dimly with the eye of scientific faith.” Haldane thinks that 
biological conceptions may soon be extended to the whole of 
nature. 

J. Arthur Thomson believes that ‘‘the formuls of physics and 
chemistry are inadequate for the re-description of the everyday 
bodily functions, or of behavior, or of development, or of evolu- 
tion.” They “do not suffice for answering the distinctively bi- 
ological questions.” In biology “we need new concepts — such 
as that of the organism as a historic being which has traded with 
time, and has enregistered within itself past experiences and ex- 


1See especially his Mechanism, Life, and Personality (John Murray, London), 
pp. 101, 104, etc. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 83 


periments, and which has ever its conative bow bent towards the 
future.” } | 

In fact, none of the unique qualities which distinguish living 
from non-living matter has been explained. We can only say 
that living things grow; they choose things suitable for food and 
reject other things; they adjust themselves to the environment; 
they are sensitive to stimuli; they protect themselves and repro- 
duce themselves; but we have no explanation of these powers in 
terms simpler than the powers themselves. We have learned a 
good deal about the manner of reproduction and the laws of he- 
redity. We can describe by means of Mendel’s laws how certain 
characters, which we call unit characters or genes, are distributed 
in the offspring. We can discern through our powerful micro- 
scopes the minute divisions of the cell. We can count the chro- 
mosomes in the nucleus, and even the chromomeres, and can 
watch their division. We can make the supposition that there 
are separate “factors” or ‘‘genes” in the germ cell, which 
stand in definite relations to the several future parts of the 
organism. But transferring the mystery to very minute struc- 
tures does not make the mystery any the less; we can watch 
the division of a cell into two cells, but we do not understand 
either why it divides or how the daughter cell inherits all the 
peculiar forms of the parent cell. ‘‘The study of the cell has on 
the whole seemed to widen rather than narrow the enormous 
gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inor- 
ganic world.” ? 

But other serious difficulties with the mechanistic scheme con- 
front us. One thing, for instance, which is not generally appre- 
ciated is that mechanism has at its disposal no organizing or 
directive agency which shall make the evolutionary process intel- 
ligible. Mechanism, at least in its extreme form, involves the 
explanation of living beings, from the simple speck of protoplasm 
to the complex human body, as due to the chance assemblage of 
mass particles inspace. We could not even say that vital proc- 
esses are due to the peculiar character of the motions of the mass 


1 The System of Animate Nature (Henry Holt and Company), vol.1, pp. 143-60. 
2 EK. B. Wilson, Z'he Cell in Development and Inheritance, p. 434. 


84 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


particles, for all motions must conform to the usual mechanical 
laws. But the particles get into peculiar relationships, and these 
peculiar relationships constitute life, and these peculiar relation- 
ships or constellations of atoms and molecules are accidental: 
Life, therefore, is a mere incident, or, worse still, an accident, in 
cosmic evolution. Indeed, it would seem inconsistent even to use 
the phrase cosmic evolution, for the word evolution implies some 
orderly progressive change or unfolding. We should have to speak 
merely of cosmic change. It would not be consistent with the 
mechanistic conception to think of the world of organisms as an 
unfolding of something wrapped up or potentially present in the 
original matter or energy; neither would it be consistent to think 
of it as working or progressing either consciously or uncon- 
sciously toward any end, purpose, or goal. It would seem that 
the consistent mechanist must hold that the world of living forms 
has all come about by the accidental groupings of molecules of 
matter. 

To this, to be sure, the mechanist may reply that, if we keep in 
mind the immensity of time and remember that every combina- 
tion may be tried, those only surviving which are adapted to sur- 
vive, the mystery of a mechanistic evolution becomes less than 
that of an animistic one. But here again we wonder how the 
mechanist can speak of adaptation in a purely mechanistic 
scheme. What is it that the useful combinations are adapted 
to and what are they useful for? 


Life on other planets 

It is interesting to trace out the implications of the mechanistic 
theory, so that if we accept it we may know what it is that we are 
accepting. One curious and hitherto unnoticed result appears 
from an article in Science, published in September, 1921. When 
we look up at the sky at night, we see thousands of stars. The 
telescope reveals millions more and the photographic plate shows 
a thousand million. These stars are suns, and we love to think 
that like our Sun they are surrounded, or will be surrounded, by 
planets, and that upon these planets there are or will be living 
forms, plants, animals, and perhaps intelligent beings. Our own 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 85 


near neighbor, the planet Mars, is thought to have an atmo- 
sphere and possibly inhabitants. 

But all this is a fable, or nearly a fable, for the chances that on 
any one globe there should ever happen that peculiar assemblage 
of elements and conditions which produce life are almost infi- 
nitely small.? 

If this be the implication of the mechanistic theory, it certainly 
is not a very interesting prospect. A theory which compels us to 
believe that life and mind are limited to this little Earth in this 
mighty Universe seems rather cold and sterile. Perhaps, how- 
ever, not all mechanistic philosophers would accept the necessity 
of this implication, or possibly they would say that if life and 
mind do not exist on other planets there may be other things 
there just as valuable. Few of us, however, will be able to ac- 
cept this conclusion. Our belief in the uniformity and continu- 
ity of nature is so strong that some way would have to be found 
to escape this unwelcome conclusion, even if it involved a break 
in the mechanistic reasoning. 

Indeed, the very opposite view is held by Benjamin Moore. 
“‘It was no fortuitous combination of chances,” he says, ‘‘and no 
cosmic dust, which brought life to the womb of our ancient 
mother Earth in the far distant Paleozoic ages, but a well-regu- 
lated, orderly development, which comes to every mother earth 
in the Universe in the maturity of her creation when the condi- 
tions arrive within the suitable limits.” ? 

A somewhat similar conclusion is drawn by Henderson, Pro- 
fessor of Chemistry in Harvard University, in two books which 
have been very much discussed.* Henderson’s argument, which 

1 The article is by W. D. Matthew, of the American Museum of Natural 
History. The author is not using this argument at all against a mechanistic 
theory of the world. He is not discussing this subject. He says that, although 
conditions have been favorable for the creation of living matter on the Earth’s 
surface perhaps for a thousand million years, life has come into existence only 
once or at most half a dozen times. Some immensely complex concatenation of 
circumstances took place so rare that it has occurred but once or a very few 
times in the eons of geological time. The chances, therefore, of its occurring in 
other worlds are accordingly remote. This theory, however, evidently rests 
upon the supposition that life is the result of the chance collocation of elements. 


2 The Origin and Nature of Life (Henry Holt and Company, Home University 


Library), p. 190. 
3 The Fitness of the Environment, and The Order of Nature, by Lawrence J. 


Henderson. 


86 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


will be examined more fully in a later chapter when we are study- 
ing the question of purposiveness in nature, seems to show that, 
however we may explain the coming of life upon the Earth, it 
could not have been the result.of chance, but of some deep per- 
vading law or tendency, the character of which is unknown to us. 
The world, he thinks, is biocentric, centering about the produc- 
tion of life. 

That the Universe is not only biocentric but anthropocentric 
is the remarkable theory held by the distinguished scientist, 
Alfred Russel Wallace. In 1903, Wallace published a very inter- 
esting book entitled Man’s Place in the Universe. His conclu- 
sions in this book are so striking and unique that they would be 
given little credence, if they had come from any one else than 
this distinguished scholar. Wallace was at home not only in the 
whole field of biology, where he ranked with Darwin himself, but 
also in the fields of physical, astronomical, and geological sci- 
ence. His conclusions, based on a great range of evidence which 
cannot be reviewed here, are that no other planet in the solar sys- 
tem than the Earth is inhabited, or ever has been, or ever will be. 
The conditions on each of our other planets are such that there 
never has been and never can be any life development such as ex- 
ists on the Earth. Furthermore, Wallace concludes that it is in 
the highest degree improbable that there are among the hundreds 
of millions of stars in the Universe any suns that have habitable 
planets — and this strange result is also based on astronomical 
evidence that seems rather convincing. That there may possi- 
bly be ver: simple forms of life on other planets need not neces- 
sarily be questioned; it is only that the conditions on other plan- 
ets and on the planets of other suns are not such as could admit 
of any such development of life from the lower animal forms up 
to man as we have on the Earth. Neither does Wallace see any- 
thing unreasonable in the view that the Earth should be the 
one place in the Universe where that final consummation rep- 
resented by man and his mind should be realized. The very 
position of the solar system near the center of our Universe is 
indeed one of the physical conditions for such a réle. It is not 
inconceivable that “‘in order to produce a world that should be 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 87 


precisely adapted in every detail for the orderly development 
of organic life culminating in man, such a vast and complex 
universe as that which is known to exist around us may have 
been absolutely required.” 

Certain of Wallace’s arguments have lost some of their force 
since the discovery of the increased length of time, due to radio- 
activity, in which a body like our Sun may send forth light and 
heat; but it must be admitted that the remaining evidence_is 
pretty strong. Curiously enough, however, so far from leading 
to a mechanistic interpretation of the world, as if life and man 
were mere accidents happening once on our insignificant planet, 
the result is interpreted by Wallace in precisely the opposite way, 
as if the very stars in the heavens exist that man and mind may 
be realized. 

Many, I fear, will find it difficult to accept this view; but if we 
are unable to accept it, the mechanistic alternative, namely, that 
life is an accident that has happened rarely, or perhaps only once, 
is not the only alternative. Since science has recently shown 
that the radiant energy of suns may last through time which to 
our minds would seem almost infinite, Wallace’s argument about 
the impossibility of a full development of life on the planets of 
other suns loses much of itsforce. In the light of the present the- 
ories of radio-activity, there may be sources of energy in even the 
smaller suns of our Universe such as may enable them to send 
forth light and heat for the hundreds of millions of years which 
are necessary for such a development of life as we have on the 
Earth. If this be true, there may be many othyr planets on 
which there is taking place an evolution of life similar to our 
own, culminating in the creation of rational and moral beings 
like man, who are not merely products of a creative evolution, 
but who can understand and appreciate it. To assume that 
every star in the heavens is the center of such a development is 
not necessary, of course; but on the other hand we are not justi- 
fied in affirming that it may not take place in many other worlds 
_ than our own. 


88 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Is the Universe running down? 

Another puzzling difficulty in the mechanistic philosophy is 
one which arises in connection with the second law of thermo-dy- 
namics. According to the law in question, throughout the world 
of lifeless things there is a continual loss of available energy due 
to the fact that in all transformations of energy some of it be- 
comes unavailable for doing further work by passing into the 
form of diffused heat and being radiated into space. We may 
transform the latent energy of our forests, our coal-beds, and our 
deposits of oil, into kinetic energy to drive our cars or carry our 
messages, but some of it is always lost in every energy trans- 
formation. The Universe must, therefore, be running down 
and tending to equilibrium. Even if untold stores of energy are 
locked up in the atoms and could possibly be utilized, neverthe- 
less they will with fateful certainty be used up and the world 
must sometime come to a standstill. To make the matter worse, 
since we are not allowed to think of the beginning of the world — 
that is, of a creation — it must in infinite time long ago have run 
itself out and become dead and motionless. But it seems to be 
teeming with life and energy, to be very much “a going con- 
cern.” Presumably, therefore, there must be some creative 
agency at work.! 

Now, in the bodies of plants and animals there is at least a par- 
tial reversal of the downward movement in the inorganic world. 
In the metabolism of plants there is a synthetic process in which 
available energy is accumulated in the form of highly complex 
chemical compounds. In this way vast quantities of available 
energy have been stored up in our forests and coal-beds. Here, 
at any rate, we see a partial retardation in the loss of available 
energy going on in the inorganic world. 

Of course in the case of man we have a further illustration of 
this retardation in the degradation of energy. The power of 
the human mind is effective in checking the downward move- 
ment of inorganic nature, as in the forestation of denuded areas, 


1 There are certainly no signs of running down in the stellar universe. Some 
scientists believe that there is a restoration of the atoms in space due to the 
action of radiant energy. See Scientia, 1, 1, 1923, art., ‘‘Cosmic Evolution.” 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 89 


and the reclamation of soils. From this point of view the temp- 
tation might be strong to think of cosmic mind as the creative 
agency which, it would appear, must be constantly at work 
throughout the Universe. At any rate, some creative agency 
apparently there must be. 


The autonomy of life 

We see how difficult it is to describe living processes in terms of 
matter and motion when we consider such striking facts as the 
restitution of function and the regeneration of lost parts in animal 
bodies. When one part of an organism is injured, another part 
having normally a different function may take over that of the 
injured part. In the case of the starfish, when one arm is cut off, 
the living organism successfully undertakes the restitution of the 
lost part, the living cells evidently assuming foreign duties. The 
animal has to meet an emergency to the end of self-preservation 
and proves equal to it. Of course, when we attempt to describe 
the behavior of the organism in such terms as “meeting an emer- 
gency,” ‘‘adjusting itself to the environment,” ‘‘to the end” of 
self-preservation, we are using terms drawn from human behav- 
ior. But the point is that these terms, and these terms only, 
do explain the behavior of living things. It is not a case of me- 
chanical action and reaction, for the organism reacts in a way of 
its own, in a way to secure a desired end, in a way peculiarly 
fitted to bring itself into a ‘satisfied relation” to its environ- 
ment. There is a fundamental difference here between the ac- 
tion of a living organism and that of inorganic matter. In the 
former we have something which we may call “‘behavior,’’ where 
action is determined, not by mechanical forces acting from be- 
hind, but by an end to be achieved. 

There are gaps, then, in mechanism; certain aspects of the living 
being, in the present state of science, appear to be unintelligible, i.e., 
irreducible to physico-chemical forces. What is it that shrinks from 
mechanical explanation in this way? It would seem to be a principle of 
finality, inherent, in spite of everything, in the most elementary vital 
phenomenon. The living being is reduced to protoplasm, whose func- 
tion it is to react under the influence of external activities. In it, we 
say, spontaneity is nil, reaction is equal to action. But, it may be re- 


90 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


marked, this reaction is not any kind of a reaction; it is incompletely 
characterized when defined from the sole standpoint of quantity, for it 
possesses the unexpected property of favouring not only the conserva- 
tion, but also the development and propagation of the very individual 
that reacts. The exercise of irritability is expressed by losses; now, 
organic matter reacts exactly in such a way as to make good these 
losses. Besides, it reacts so as to adapt itself to environment, to make 
life possible for itself in the various conditions in which it happens to be 
placed. Inshort, by a process of reproduction, it ensures the perpetuity 
of the form it represents. It has frequently been said that life is essen- 
tially a vicious circle. The organ makes the function possible, and the 
function is the condition of the organ; muscular contraction accelerates 
the circulation of the blood, and the circulation of the blood keeps up 
muscular contraction. In every important physiological phenomenon 
we find the vicious circle. In the living being, then, there would appear 
to be an internal finality. The living being, regarded as an individual, 
makes use of that which is around it to ensure its own subsistence. 
The reflex action that characterizes it offers two aspects: the one, which 
concerns physics and chemistry; the other, which has no analogy in the 
objects of these sciences.! 


Thus it comes about that the vocabulary of the mechanical 
sciences does not fit the behavior of living organisms. Life is 
autonomous, having its own laws and its own vocabulary. Life 
is insurgent, pressing with patient and never-tiring persistence 
into every nook and corner of the Earth’s crust, into the depths 
of the seas, under thick antarctic ice, in hot springs, on moun- 
tain-tops, in arid plains. Life is struggle. It has this capacity 
— to persist and struggle with the environment, to adjust itself 
to conditions. It is the will to live, the continuous adjustment 
of internal to external conditions. ‘‘Tactics and strategy are its 
instruments.” It is inventive, and, as Bergson says, “remains 


1fimile Boutroux, Natural Law in Science and Philosophy. Translated by 
F. Rothwell. (Copyrighted by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by per- 
mission), pp. 114, 115, 116. 

Compare also the able discussion of this subject in W. E. Ritter’s striking 
book, The Unity of the Organism, chapter xx1, especially pages 198 ff. Try, for 
instance, he says, to explain the scratch-reflex of the dog by means of the ele- 
mentalist theory, by referring it to the physico-chemical elements at the basis of 
the act. Marshal them all together, but in the end you find that there is an 
element lacking. Something has intervened between the simple elements and 
the reflex — and that something is the dog. In other words, there is something 
else that is real than the material elements and the physical and chemical processes, 
namely, the organism itself, involving structure and organization and integration. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 91 


inventive even in its adaptations.”’ Life is selective, seeking its 
appropriate food and rejecting that which it does not find fit. 


Physico-chemical processes in the organism are only the means 
whereby the latter develops, and grows, and functions, and acts. In 
the analysis of these processes we see nothing but the reactions studied 
in physical chemistry; but whenever we consider the organism as a 
whole we seem to see a coordination, or a control or a direction of these 
physico-chemical processes. Niageli has said that in the development 
of the embryo every cell acts as if it knew what every other cell were 
doing. There is a kind of autonomy in the developing embryo, or re- 
generating organism, such that the normal, typical form and structure 
comes into existence even when unforeseen interference with the usual 
course of development has been attempted: in this case the physico- 
chemical reactions which proceed in the normal train of events proceed 
in some other way, and the new direction is imposed on the developing 
embryo by the organization which we have to regard as inherent in it. 
This same direction and autonomy must be recognised in the behaviour 
of the adult organism as a whole.! 


Vitalism 

Is there now any way in which all these puzzling difficulties in 
the mechanistic theory of organic life may be met? Is the the- 
ory called “ Vitalism”’ any better? Let us now consider this pro- 
posed solution of the problem. 

Vitalism in its crudest form is the doctrine that life is due to a 
non-material force or entity called a ‘‘vital principle.”’ This the- 
ory goes back to Aristotle, who thought of the soul as the vital 
principle, or the seat and source of life. Plants have a vegeta- 
tive soul, animals have a vegetative and sensitive soul, while the 
soul of man is vegetative, sensitive, and rational. During the 
Middle Ages, following Aristotle, it was generally believed that 
there is a source of life quite distinct from matter, usually some 
psychical or spiritual principle. 

Descartes, however, taught that plant and animal bodies are 
machines pure and simple, actuated only by material forces. 
The body of man is no exception to this rule; only in the case of 
- man there is a spiritual soul, which acts upon the body. After 


1 James Johnstone, The Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge University Press), 
pp. 160-61. 


92 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Descartes it was easy to extend the principle of mechanism to 
man’s whole personality, omitting the soul; and in: scientific cir- 
cles it became customary in many cases to ridicule the notion of 
a vital principle or any spiritual entity presiding in plant or ani- 
mal bodies. This mechanistic attitude has become traditional 
in scientific circles, so that in biological laboratories at the present 
day it is no doubt considered good form to smile at the notion of 
a vital principle. Such a principle could not be subjected to any 
experimental tests and would not lend itself to scientific demon- 
stration. 

Under these circumstances, the recent revival of vitalism in 
scientific circles is significant. The leader in this ‘‘neo-vital- 
ism” is Hans Driesch, a German biologist. Driesch, whose 
conclusions are based upon experimental evidence, is fully con- 
vinced that life cannot be explained on a mechanistic basis. To 
quote his own words, he says: 

No kind of causality based upon the constellations of single physical 
and chemical acts can account for organic individual development; this 
development is not to be explained by any hypothesis about configura- 
tion of physical and chemical agents. ... Life, at least morphogenesis, 
is not a specialized arrangement of inorganic events; biology, therefore, 


is not applied physics and chemistry; life is something apart, and biol- 
ogy is an independent science. 


Driesch, further, believes that life is due to the presence of 
a non-material factor, to which he gives the name Enielechy, 
and sometimes the name Psychoid. The first of these terms 
is taken from Aristotle and means a perfecting principle; the 
second indicates the author’s belief that the vital principle is 
mental in its nature. While many biologists — probably a large 
majority of them — regard the revival of vitalism as a recrudes- 
cence of mysticism, nevertheless, a surprising number of biolo- 
gists, zodlogists, and paleontologists have adopted more or less 
fully the neo-vitalistic position.” 

1 Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism (Gifford Lectures, 
1908), p. 142. 

2A valuable summary of the various views on this subject may be found in 
Vernon L. Kellogg’s book, entitled Darwinism T'o-Day. 

An able treatment from the vitalistic standpoint may be found in the book of 


James Johnstone, entitled The Philosophy of Biology, published by the Cambridge 
University Press. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 93 


We have already seen some of the difficulties in accounting for 

life on a strictly physical and chemical basis. But does it help 
the matter any to introduce a mysterious “‘vital principle”? Is 
it not merely saying that physical and chemical forces and mate- 
rials do not explain the existence of life or the peculiar attributes 
of living things, and consequently we must introduce a vital prin- 
ciple? To this the mechanistic philosopher answers that such a 
principle does not permit of experimental determination and can 
have no value or standing in science. 
_ If, however, the vitalist should take the position, as he some- 
times does, that such peculiar qualities of living bodies as, for 
instance, adaptivity, can only be explained by the presence of a 
mental factor, his position would be somewhat stronger. Stated 
in this way vitalism is not so apt to raise the ire of the mechanist. 
Or, again, if the vitalist, instead of invoking a vital principle, pre- 
fers to speak of a vital energy, or biotic energy, which is to take 
its place on equal footing with the various mechanical energies, in- 
teracting with them, again the mechanist is not so seriously of- 
fended. Or, if the vitalist should say that vitalism means only 
this to him, that there is some organizing agency which does not 
in any way interfere with the mechanical interplay and conserva- 
tion of the physical energies involved, still again the mechanist 
may offer no serious objection. It is as if one should observe a 
great body of men and horses at work upon the foundation of a 
building. Every movement of every muscle of man or horse 
can be explained mechanistically and perhaps accounted for in 
calories of food; yet the whole process cannot be explained apart 
from the directing intelligence of the architect and builder who 
may not appear at all on the scene. 

Perhaps this last suggestion may open a way for the reconcili- 
ation of the long-standing differences between the mechanists 
and vitalists. For this new view there will be no better name 
than that of “Creative Evolution,” although the view will be 
somewhat different from that of Bergson. 


Creative Evolution 
Let us say that the secret of living organisms is found in organ- 


94 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


zation, in structure. Life is the outcome of the organization of 
non-living elements. Living bodies are highly organized, highly 
complex forms of simple inorganic elements. A living body 
contains no mysterious entity called a vital principle, or vege- 
tative or sensitive soul. It is not a soul or vital spark in living 
organisms which causes life, or gives rise to the power of growth 
and reproduction. These properties are the outcome of organ- 
ization and structure. 

This seems thus far to be precisely the ground taken by the 
mechanists, and they will no doubt say that a solution thus be- 
gun seems hopeful. But, if the vitalists concede that the pecul- 
iar qualities of living things follow merely from the organization 
of material elements, the mechanists may concede that the or- 
ganization itself does not take place apart from some organizing 
agency. It is probable that what most mechanists object to is 
the intrusion of some mystical vital entity into a living body and 
the assumption that such a vital entity is effective in producing 
vital phenomena, mixing or meddling, so to speak, with the reg- 
ular physical and chemical forces. Perhaps they would not ob- 
ject to the necessity of some organizing agency, or source of 
energy, effective in organization. It is probable that many pro- 
nounced anti-vitalists would not insist that the constellation of 
inorganic elements in living bodies is the result of chance. Or, 
if they use the word “‘chance”’ at all, perhaps they would mean 
by it nothing more than that the causes of organization are 
unknown. . 

If, now, these two reasonable concessions could be made, 
then we should have the following situation: First, it would fol- 
low that organic evolution would proceed by the method of crea- 
tive synthesis.1 Creative synthesis means nothing more than 
that a synthesis takes place, and thereby new processes, powers, 
or activities appear — that is, are created. The theory of levels 
has thrown much light on the problems of life and mind. Elec- 

1The phrase was first used by Wundt. Clear statements of the modern 
theory of creative synthesis and the theory of levels may be found in E. G. 
Spaulding’s book, entitled The New Rationalism, p. 500 ff.; in R. W. Sellars’s, 


Evolutionary Naturalism, chap. xv; and in C. Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evo- 
lution. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 95 


trons are organized into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules 
into cells, cells into living bodies, and at each new level of organi- 
zation new qualities appear, which are in the nature of new crea- 
tions, since they cannot be inferred by adding together the quali- 
ties of the elements which are organized. Oxygen and hydrogen 
are organized into a molecule of water, which possesses proper- 
ties that do not belong to oxygen or hydrogen, and that could not 
be predicted from the completest knowledge of these two ele- 
ments. Water will refresh the thirsty plant, and will freeze at a 
certain temperature. Not so the oxygen or hydrogen of which it 
is composed. There is something more in the water than oxygen 
and hydrogen; there is structure. A molecule of water is com- 
paratively a simple structure, but other molecules, such as those 
of the colloids, are remarkably complex and possess remarkable 
qualities. Finally comes that wonderfully complex structure of 
complex molecules which we call living matter, and then there 
emerges a whole series of new qualities, such as growth, assimila- 
tion, irritability, adaptivity, and reproduction. These remark- 
able qualities are not the sum of any qualities belonging to the 
elements of which the structure is composed. Two plus two do 
not make four in this case. The new created qualities arise from 
the organization. We can hardly say that they are the effect of 
the union of molecules into organic bodies. The relation which 
we are accustomed to express by the words “‘cause and effect”’ 
does not quite apply here, unless we studiously eliminate from 
the cause-and-effect relation any notion of mechanical equival- 
ence, such as we are always trying to bring in. It is perhaps 
better to say that the new qualities emerge from the organi- 
zation. 3 

What we see all the way up the ladder of evolution is matter 
taking on form, taking on structure and organization, and, as the 
outcome of these new forms, we see the creation of new and 
“strange’’ powers. At each new level of reality we have new 
powers and new capacities and new qualities. It is a flowering- 
out process, wholly different from the mechanical sequences 
which we see in the world of physics. New realities are born at 
each new level. Life is one of these realities. Later we shall 


96 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


have to discuss the problem whether Mind is another such 
reality. 

Weseem justified, too, in thinking of this kind of creative evo- 
lution as issuing in new values at each level. Life is something 
intrinsically “better”? than non-life. Should we be justified 
further in speaking of the world process as teleological, as if life 


and mind were goals which Nature is striving to achieve? In this — 


metaphysical mood should we dare to go still further and think 
of the whole world movement as a great process of development, 
something after the manner of Hegel and Aristotle? And shall 
we think of it as a process of realization of higher values, such as 
human thought and consciousness and human society and coép- 
eration and art and religion? 

The answers to these questions are beyond us at present. 
Just now it is sufficient to note that life is a new kind of reality, 
not in the vitalistic sense of a kind of new factor intruding into 
physical bodies, but in the evolutionary sense of a new reality 
emerging from the organization of simpler elements into more 
complex and more highly integrated forms of being. 


Instead, then, of seeking to interpolate a new agency — non-material 
and not perceptual — we express the fact that living is not explicable in 
terms of matter and motion by saying that all organisms — known to 
our senses as collocations of protoplasm — reveal new aspects of reality, 
transcending mechanical formulation.} 


The creative agency 

But now we must face the second of our two problems in Crea- 
tive Evolution; that is, the organizing source or agency. We 
can perhaps think of atoms and molecules getting into piles or 
bundles by chance encounters. In this way Democritus tried to 
explain the beginnings of things, but even he evidently assumed 
some gravitational forces bringing atoms into clusters or nuclei. 
But to account for an organism is quite another thing. What we 
seem to need is some kind of force just the opposite of those grav- 
itational or mechanical forces which tend to bring the world to 
an equilibrium. We need some form of creative energy to lift 

1J, Arthur Thomson, The System of Animate Nature, vol. 1, p. 168. 


.— ee ee 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 97 


the world to higher levels, or if we wish to retain the word ‘‘en< 
ergy’’ for its usual meaning in physics, we may say that we seem 
to need some power to direct and integrate our physical energies 
— to marshal them into order, so to speak. We are accustomed 
to think of atoms and electrons and physical energies as being 
elemental forms of being, but is the power of directing and coér- 
dinating energies any less elemental? 4 

In the next chapter we shall see how little of our real world 
evolution explains and how much in need of explanation is evolu- 
tion itself. To explain evolution, to explain creative synthesis, 
to explain organization all the way up the ladder, to explain life, 
perhaps even to explain matter, we seem to need to make the 
postulate of some creative energy. As Professor Moore says, 
“traces of evidence are lately beginning to come into view, which 
are highly suggestive of continuous present-day creation of mat- 
ter at the inorganic level, and of creation of life from inorganic 
materials at the organic level.’ 2 

Such a creative agency has, of course, been postulated in 
every religious system of the world and in most of the philosophi- 
cal systems; but here we are trying to work out the problem from 
the biological point of view. What does the biologist say about 
creative agency? It is not likely that he will any longer object 
to the use of the word ‘‘creative’”’ on account of its theological 
associations, since it has now been given good standing by such 
writers as Bergson, Wundt, Benjamin Moore, William Patten, 
and many others. But if he does, what will he say about an or- 
ganizing power or agency? Probably many biologists will sim- 
ply say that this subject belongs to metaphysics and is outside 
the sphere of strict science. But there is no such sharp demarca- 

1 ‘Tf the argument of this book is sound, then the problem of the origin of life, 
as it is usually stated, is only a pseudo-problem; we may as usefully discuss the 
origin of the second law of thermo-dynamics! If life is not only energy, but also 
the direction and codrdination of energies; if it is a tendency of the same order, 
but of a different direction, from the tendency of inorganic processes, all that 
biology can usefully do is to inquire into the manner in which this tendency is 
manifested in material things and energy-transformations. But the tendency 
itself is something elemental.’’ — James Johnstone, The Philosophy of Biology 
(Cambridge University Press), pp. 340-41. 


2 The Origin and Nature of Life (Henry Holt and Company, Home University 
Library), p. 31. 


98 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


tion nowadays between philosophy and science. They are get- 
ting to be one in purpose and interest. The biologist 1s becom- 
ing more and more a philosopher, and the philosopher a biologist, 
and as for the creative agency, or organizing principle, the biolo- 
gist must either find a way to get along without it, or at least 
wonder what it is. 

At first sight it seems to be the old philosophical problem of 
the moving cause. In the Hebrew philosophy we read, “‘In the be- - 
ginning God created the heaven and the earth.” In Aristotle, it 
is the Primum Mobtle, or First Mover, or God. In Plato, it is the 
Demiurgus, or World-Builder. In Anaxagoras, it is Nous, or 
Mind. And so we could go through the history of philosophy, 
recalling the Natura Naturans of Bruno and Spinoza, the Abso- 
lute Idea of Hegel, the Absolute Ego of Fichte, the Pure Creative 
Energy of Schelling, the Absolute Will of Schopenhauer, the Will 
to Power of Nietzsche, the Unconscious Will of von Hartmann, 
the World Soul of Fechner, the Universal Will of Wundt, the Un- 
knowable of Spencer, the Power that Makes for Righteousness of 
Matthew Arnold, the Absolute Self of modern idealists, and sim- 
ply God in many and many philosophies. 

But in these philosophical answers to the question we are not 
now interested. We want a biological answer. Is there from 
the biological point of view any initial agency which may serve to 
explain the constructive work of nature and which we may think 
of as the cause of those structures whose functional activity is 
life? Does biology recognize to-day any “internal perfecting 
principle,’ such as Aristotle believed in, any ‘‘life force,’’ such as 
that repeatedly referred to by Bernard Shaw, any “inherent 
growth force,’ such as Goethe believed in, or anything like the 
“psychoid’”’ or ‘“‘entelechy”’ of Driesch? 

I think we must answer that such agencies are very commonly 
recognized in biology. In some cases, as in the work of Driesch 
and his fellow vitalists, they are non-mechanical agencies lying 
quite outside the region of physical and chemical forces. Some- 
times, and more commonly, they take the form merely of a cona- 
tive principle operating within the sphere of organic life, such for 


instance as Darwin’s “struggle for existence,” Nageli’s “internal 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 99 


factor tending towards perfection,’ ! or Geddes and Thomson’s 
‘“‘originative impulse.”’2 The “struggle for freedom” is what it 
is called by Albert P. Mathews. The tree of life, he says, is 
“‘psycho-tropic,” tending upwards toward mind. In the prime- 
val slime from which all life has proceeded there is a capacity 
which the mechanistic philosophy has overlooked. It is the 
capacity of struggling against the environment. ‘This is the very 
essence of life. Life is struggle. 


While the fact of evolution has been established ... there still re- 
mains unexplained, or not adequately explained, the great onward roll- 
ing tide of life, which bears man riding like Neptune on its crest.... 
Considered as a process rather than as a road, evolution is the struggle 
of life with its environment, a struggle for freedom, leading to the tri- 
umph of the mind and the winning of individuality; it is the struggle of 
the spirit within us to be superior to matter, to escape the trammels of 
matter, to secure a fuller individual life and a larger freedom.? 


John Burroughs thinks that we have to assume in the organic 
world something which he calls an organizing principle. ‘‘Nat- 
ural selection,” he says, “‘is not a creative, but a purely mechan- 
ical process.”” ‘‘Chance, or chance selection, works alike in the 
organic and the inorganic realms, but it develops no new forms 
in the inorganic, because there is no principle of development, no 
organizing push. But in organized matter there is, in and be- 
hind all this organizing, a developing principle or tendency; the 
living force is striving toward other forms; in other words, devel- 
opment occurs because there is something to develop. An acorn 
develops, but a quartz pebble only changes.” 4 

Again we hear of a special force or energy, comparable with 
other recognized forms of energy, such, for instance, as the 
‘biotic energy” accepted by Benjamin Moore,® or J. M. 

1 His Vervollkommnungsprinzip. 

2 We feel compelled to recognize the persistence of some originative impulse 
within the organism, which expresses itself in variation and mutation and in all 
kinds of creative effort and endeavor. — Evolution, Home University Library, 
4 ethan P. Mathews, ‘‘The Road of Evolution,’”’ Yale Review, January, 1922, 
pp. 340, 344, and 346. 

4 John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe, p. 209. 


5 Some term is obviously required applicable to the entirely peculiar set of 
phergy phenomena witnessed in living matter, such as biotic energy....The 


100 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Macfarlane,! or the ‘‘mitokinetic force” of Marcus Hartog.? 

Sometimes again the agency in question is thought of as some 
cosmic impulse more fundamental even than life itself. The 
“creative agency’ that Patten tells us about seems somewhat 
like the vital impetus of Bergson. ‘There is in nature, he says, 
an abiding compulsion 


which is cumulative, or progressive, producing that increasing archi- 
tectural organization that we call nature-growth, or evolution.... 
Progressive union and stability, progressive codperation, organization, 
service and discipline are, therefore, inherent properties of life and 
matter....The ceaseless flow of creative services is evolution, and 
evolution is serial creation....In this broader concept of nature- 
growth, light and gravity, vitality, genes, and gemules, heredity, intelli- 
gence, ‘selection,’ social conduct, and all the rest of the growth-machin- 
ery of life portrayed by the physicists and biologists may be regarded 
merely as local, or special manifestation of a common creative agency.® 


With Bergson, the élan wtal is a primordial world-principle, 
the basic reality of all being, the source and ground of evolution, 
a vital impulse, or push, or creative ground, pervading matter, 
insinuating itself in it, overcoming its inertia and its resistance, 
determining the direction of evolution as well as evolution itself. 
This ever-changing, expanding, free activity is life itself. The 
earliest animate forms, tiny masses of protoplasm, were pos- 
sessed of a tremendous internal push, “‘that was to raise them 
even to the highest forms of life.” The evolution of life is a crea- 
tion that goes on forever in virtue of an initial movement. 


position which denies the existence of a form of energy characteristic of life is one 
of peculiar absurdity even for the pure mechanician, which can only be explained 
as a natural reaction from the entirely different medieval conception of a vital 
force which worked impossible miracles.’ — The Origin and Nature of Life, 
pp. 225 and 226. 

1 Macfarlane believes that it is impossible to account for life and mind and 
evolution unless we assume in addition to the usual and well-known physical 
forms of energy, such as thermic, chemic, electric energy, also other special forms 
of energy, which we call biotic, cognitic, and cogitic energies. — John Muirhead 
Macfarlane, The Causes and Course of Organic Evolution. See especially chaps. 
Iv, v, and vi. 

2 Hartog believes that life can be explained only by the presence of a new force 
in organisms distinct from any other known physical force. This new force he 
calls Mitokinetism. — Problems of Life and Reproduction, chap. tv. 

§’ William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution (R. G. Badger), pp. xii, 28, 
29, 47. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 101 


Whether we will or no, we must appeal to some inner directing princi. 
ple in order to account for this convergence of effects. Such conver- 
gence does not appear possible in the Darwinian, and especially the 
neo-Darwinian, theory of insensible accidental variations, nor in the 
hypothesis of sudden accidental variation, nor even in the theory that 
assigns definite directions to the evolution of the various organs by a 
kind of mechanical composition of the external with the internal forces.! 


There have been few attempts to determine more exactly the 
nature of this evolutionary urge, this inner directing force, this 
primordial direction and coérdination of energies. It is, at any 
rate, quite outside the mechanistic field and seems to be a kind 
of creative power, which directs the physical forces, marshaling 
them into order. But this does not mean, as I understand it, 
that it is an agency working from without, from some disparate 
order of being or any kind of “alien influx into nature.” Of 
course it is easy for us to interpret this organizing agency as 
Mind. It is perhaps too easy for us to do so, reading back into 
nature, as the power which makes things go, that which makes 
them go in our little human world. And yet Hobhouse says, in 
the preface to the second edition of his important work on Mind 
an Evolution, that he has been led to ‘‘raise the question whether 
mind (in the infinitely varied form of its activity, from the grop- 
ing of unconscious effort to the full clearness of conscious pur- 
pose) may not be the essential driving force in all evolutionary 
change.” 

C. Lloyd Morgan, in his recent book entitled Emergent Evolu- 
tion, says we must acknowledge an original Activity which is the 
nisus or urge making actual the whole evolutionary movement. 
In many passages in this book he interprets this activity as mind 
or spirit, but he prefers to call it simply God, and even suggests 
that it acts from above as a drawing force. 


Within us, if anywhere, we must feel the urge, or however it be 
named, which shall afford the basis upon which acknowledgment of 
Activity is founded. What then does it feel like? Each must answer 
for himself, fully realising that he may misinterpret the evidence. 
Without denying a felt push from the lower levels of one’s being — a 
so-called driving force welling up from below — to me it feeis like a 


1 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), p. 76. 


102 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


drawing upwards through Activity existent at a higher level than that 
to which I have attained. 


In a somewhat similar strain, A. S. Eddington, at the end of 
his chapter ‘‘On the Nature of Things” closing his striking book 
on Space, Time, and Gravitation, comes to the conclusion that 
something of the nature of consciousness forms the essential con- 
tent of the world. 


The theory of relativity has passed in review the whole subject- 
matter of physics. It has unified the great laws, which by the precision 
of their formulation and the exactness of their application have won the 
proud place in human knowledge which physical science holds to-day. 
And yet, in regard to the nature of things, this knowledge is only an 
empty shell — a form of symbols. It is knowledge of structural form, 
and not knowledge of content. All through the physical world runs 
that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our conscious- 
ness. Here isa hint of aspects deep within the world of physics, and yet 
unattainable by the methods of physics. And, moreover, we have 
found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but 
regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. 

We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. 
We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its 
origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that 
made the foot-print. And lo! it is our own.? 


In conclusion, what shall we say in answer to this difficult 


question concerning the origin and nature of life? The problem 


itself is momentous, for if we can find the key to the mystery of 


the origin and the nature of the first living cell, we shall perhaps _ 


have found the key to the whole “grand strategy of evolution,” 
which has culminated in human life and human consciousness 


and human history. Both the current theories of life, that of © 


Mechanism and that of Vitalism, we have found to be disap- 
pointing. With our present light on this hardest of problems, 


the view I have outlined as that of Creative Evolution seems — 


more promising. ‘There is no sharp line of cleavage between the 
organic and the inorganic. There are no new materials and per- 


1C, Lloyd Morgan, F.R.S., Emergent Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), 
p. 208. 
2 Space, Time, and Gravitation (Cambridge University Press), pp. 200-01. 


THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LIFE 103 


haps no new forces at work in the living cell. But there are 
grand new powers, new capacities, new qualities, and new values, 
which emerge from this fateful step upward in creative evolu- 
tion. Perhaps we may think of nature as a whole as a process 
of serial creation, of which the momentous outcome was to be, 
first, Life — then Mind, Consciousness, Society, History, Art, 
Literature, Science, Philosophy, and Religion. 

All these may be conceived to be the ever-towering successive 
achievements of the whole evolutionary movement. But back of 
it all there must be the organizing agency, the primordial im- 
pulse, the Creative Will. The mere stuff, the crude materials, 
the elements which are marshaled into place by this Creative 
Power — the atoms, physical energies, centers of stress and 
strain in the ether, space-time, point-event, or what not — all 
these are less important. The structure and the form are the 
significant realities and the viszon, if such there were, that saw 
them. 


{n connection with this chapter read: 
Benjamin Moore, The Origin and Nature of Life (Home University 
Library, Henry Holt and Company), chaps. 1, vu, vim. 


Further references: 
J.S. Haldane, Mechanism, Life, and Personality. (John Murray.) 


Jacques Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life. (The University of 
Chicago Press.) 


James Johnstone, The Philosophy of Biology. (Cambridge University 
Press.) 


Joseph Alexander Leighton, Man and the Cosmos (D. Appleton and 
Company), chaps. xx, XXI. 

Roy Wood Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism (Open Court Publishing 
Company), chap. xv. 

J. Arthur Thomson, The System of Animate Nature (Henry Holt and 
Company), vol. 1, Lectures 11 to v. 

John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
chap. XII. 

Vernon L. Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day (Henry Holt and Company), chap. 
Vil. 


Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


104 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


J. Arthur Thomson (editor), The Outline of Science. (G. P. Putnam’s 
Sons), vol. 11; article, ‘‘ Biology.”’ 


Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism (Adam and 
Charles Black), The Gifford Lectures for 1908. 2 vols. 


Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life. (Charles Scrib< 
ner’s Sons.) 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 


Most people give scientific men credit for much greater knowledge than 

they possess in these matters; and many educated readers will, I feel 

sure, be surprised to find that even such apparently simple phenomena 

as the rise of the sap in trees are not yet completely explained. As to 

the deeper problems of life, and growth, and reproduction, though our 

physiologists have learned an infinite amount of curious or instructive 

facts, they can give us no intelligible explanation of them. — Alfred Rus- 

sel Wallace, Man’s Place in the Universe (Doubleday, Page and Company), 

p. 203. 
THERE is a mystic word which captured the scientific thought 
of the nineteenth century and still now enchants us in the twen- 
tieth century — evolution. What interest has the student of 
philosophy in evolution? That the world is in a constant process 
of change is evident enough. Society changes, customs change, 
our environment changes, races and animal species change, the 
Earth’s surface changes, star clusters change. As Heraclitus 
said in the beginning of Greek philosophy, everything moves and 
changes. That ré changes in a gradual, orderly, and progressive 
manner is the doctrine of evolution. ‘There would certainly appear 
to be nothing very revolutionary about evolutionary philosophy. 
It is what we should expect. Since philosophy is an attempt to 
understand the world, our interest in evolution will depend upon 
the extent to which it adds to such understanding. It will be 
our purpose, then, in this chapter to see to what extent the doc- 
trine of evolution will help us to understand the world. 


General theory of development 

When we use the word ‘‘evolution,” we usually have in mind 
organic evolution, or the theory that animal species are de- 
scended from other animal species, and that all species of plants 
and animals have a common ancestry; and we usually attribute 
this theory to Darwin. There are several errors in this popular 
conception. Evolution is a broader term than organic evolu- 
tion, and refers to the general theory of development by orderly, 


106 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


progressive changes. By progressive changes we usually mean 
changes in the direction of greater complexity and a higher de- 
gree of organization. In this wider sense we may speak of the 
evolution of stellar systems, or the evolution of the Earth’s sur- 
face, or societal evolution, as well as of organic life. It is now 
believed that even our chemical elements have evolved from 
something simpler. 

Organic evolution, on the other hand, refers to the develop- 
ment of living forms from simpler living forms and ultimately 
from the simplest micro-organisms. It teaches that all forms of 
living matter, all plant and animal species, and all races of man- 
kind are descended by gradual changes from the first primordial 
living germs. The theory of organic evolution was proposed 
long before Darwin’s time and is not synonymous with Darwin- 
ism. Darwinism is a theory or set of theories subordinate to the 
general doctrine of organic evolution and serving to explain the 
method of such evolution. While the evidences for organic evo- 
lution are now complete, the evidences for Darwin’s theory are 
notsocomplete. The following table will represent the relation- 
ship of the different kinds of evolution: 


Cosmic or General Evolution 


Evolution DP 
Darwinism 


Organic Evolution | Lamarckism and other theories 
Evolution and religion 

When the doctrine of organic evolution was brought promi- 
nently before the world by Darwin in the middle of the last cen- 
tury, two misconceptions arose, which in our own time have been 
largely corrected. ‘The first was that there is some kind of con- 
flict between evolution and religion, and the second was that evo- 
lution has explained the world. As regards the first, we have 
come to learn that the religious attitude has been greatly 
strengthened by the enlarged vision which evolution has brought 
us. We have become accustomed now to the idea of develop- 
ment, and we understand its immeasurable superiority over the 
old spasmodic theory of creation. We see evolution everywhere 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 107 


about us — in nature, in society, in the mechanic arts. Even 
the youngest of us has witnessed the evolution of the automobile 
from its crude beginnings not many years ago. Our pride and 
admiration in the latest smoothly perfect product is not lessened 
by the fact of its gradual development; neither 1s our admiration 
of man lessened by his history of growth and struggle, as he has 
fought his way upward from lower animate forms, overcoming 
every obstacle. 

Perhaps much of the unhappy and needless antagonism in the 
last century to the theories of evolution could have been avoided, 
if Darwin had spoken, not of the descent of man, but of his ascent. 
It all looks quite different when we think of man as the crowning 
_masterpiece of Nature’s evolutionary methods, when we think of 
man’s creation as a divine achievement, when we think that God 
has labored through the ages to perfect him. The theory of evo- 
lution lends at once a new charm to the world, if we think of it as 
a process of realization, as the progressive creation of higher and 
higher values. 

In Watson’s beautiful poem, The Dream of Man, man, un- 
daunted by the picture of his humble origin, says: 


This is my loftiest greatness 

To have been born so low. 
Greater than Thou the ungrowing 
Am I that forever grow. 


From glory to rise unto glory 

Is mine, who have risen from gloom. 

I doubt if Thou knew’st at my making 
How near to Thy throne I should climb, 
O’er the mountainous slopes of the ages 
And the conquered peaks of time. 


It would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which the evolu- 
tionary or genetic method of study has enriched every depart- 
ment of knowledge. Evolution has given us a new method, the 
genetic method, by which we learn to understand things by 
studying their growth and development. Every science is now 
studied genetically, and we have come to understand that no 
branch of human knowledge can be understood apart from the 


108 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


knowledge of the way the subject-matter of that science has 
grown or developed. It is safe to say that both ethics and reli- 
gion have participated richly in this new method and that both 
these subjects have been immeasurably clarified. 


Evolution as a method only 

_ The other misunderstanding that arose about evolution was 
almost the opposite of the first. It was that evolution had ex- 
plained the world, including man and his mind, and that no other 
philosophy or religion was necessary. This curious error prob- 
ably came about because of a confusion between evolution as 
a method or law of change, and evolution as a force or power. 
There is a popular belief that evolution is a kind of crea- 
tive force, something that can do things. On the contrary, it is 
a mere description of nature’s method. We see in evolution 
that Nature behaves in a certain uniform way, or, if you choose, 
that God creates by a certain uniform method. The student of 
philosophy, who has already learned that natural laws are not 
forces nor powers, but merely observed uniformities, is not likely 
to fall into the mistake of making a God of evolution. 

One of the surprises for us in the study of evolution is the dis- 
covery of how little of the world it has explained. It has given 
us a valuable method of study, by which we are able to under- 
stand the meaning of many forms and functions in relation to 
their historical setting; but on the deeper problems of life and 
mind it has thrown little light. We soon discover great gaps in 
its story of life, which we supposed, of course, had long since been 
bridged by science, but which we now find have not been bridged 
at all. We find that evolution has not explained what life is or 
how it began, nor how it reproduces itself, nor how growth and 
assimilation take place, nor why there is a struggle for existence, 
nor why or how variations occur, nor even how species change 
into one another; nor has it explained that which is most impor- 
tant of all, the origin and nature of consciousness. 

This disappointment, which we are sure to feel in the failure of 
evolution to explain our great philosophical problems, must not, 
however, be laid as a fault at the door of science. Itis due rather 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 109 


to a popular misunderstanding of the purpose and claims of evo- 
lution. The evolutionary scientist, like any other scientist, is 
the very last to make rash claims about solving the problems of 
the world. He is rather a patient worker, content to point out, 
if he can, some of the steps in the method by which nature is 
working. 


Herbert Spencer 

One of the most important figures in nineteenth-century evo- 
lutionary philosophy is that of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). 
Spencer’s First Principles, in which his theory of evolution is 
fully developed, was published in 1862, three years after the pub- 
_ lication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It does not appear that 
Spencer was indebted to Darwin even for his belief in organic 
evolution, for this had been proposed by many writers before 
Darwin, and Spencer merely accepted it. Spencer’s significance, 
indeed, does not lie in this direction, but rather in his outline of a 
general system of cosmic evolution. What he gives us, there- 
fore, is an actual system of philosophy, while Darwin was merely 
working on the problem of the origin of plant and animal species. 

To Spencer, therefore, the whole world is a great evolutionary 
process. The materials of this process are found in Matter, Mo- 
tion, and Force, which are not themselves ultimate realities, but 
represent merely the limits of our knowledge. He calls them 
modes of the Unknowable. The world as we know it results from 
the redistribution of Matter, Motion, and Force. 

Now, it seemed to Spencer that it is the task of philosophy to 
find some formula which will explain the manner of the redistri- 
bution of these three ultimate knowables, or the manner of evolu- 
tion. This formula is as follows. It sounds rather formidable, 
but if carefully studied will be found to be significant of the man- 
ner In which evolution proceeds. Evolution, then, is “an inte- 
gration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during 
which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent, homo- 
geneity to a definite, coherent, heterogeneity; and during which 
the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” 

Robbed of its forbidding aspect and put in simple language, 


110 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


this means that all changes represent a process of integration and 
differentiation. In the beginning the world was a fiery mass, all 
alike and highly diffused. It began to be solidified, integrated, 
and different. Planets were separated from the Sun; land and 
water, mountains and valleys appeared and represented further 
differentiation. Any one can see how this process of integration 
and differentiation was carried on in every phase of development. 
In living beings there was first the undifferentiated mass of pro- 
toplasm. Step by step the all-alikeness is changed into manifold 
differences. Certain organs are set apart for digestion, others 
for locomotion, others for perception A single phase in the pro- 
cess may be illustrated at an advanced stage of evolution when 
the four-footed animal becomes erect, using his forward limbs no 
longer for locomotion, but for climbing and manipulation of food. 
Another phase later appears when the thumb is opposed to the 
other four digits and a new differentiation takes place. In soci- 
ety the same process is seen in the division of labor, even at the 
present time labor becoming more specialized daily. Changes in 
language illustrate the same law. 

Spencer was rather carried away with the possibilities of his 
favorite formula, and if not with him, at any rate with many of 
his disciples, it has passed for an explanation. In later years, 
however, numerous exceptions were found to Spencer’s law and 
some critics have gone so far as to ask, If it be true, what of 
it? We may call this process “ Evolution,” but we are little 
wiser than we were before. We desire to know more about that 
mystic trio with which Spencer starts and we are unreasonable 
enough to ask to know more about his Unknowable. It pleased 
Spencer to write this word with a capital U, and it was a conven- 
ient abyss in which to sink all the hard questions as to origins 
and productive and creative forces. But this kind of Agnosti- 
cism does not appeal to the modern student, because philosophy 
springs from a desire to know, so that Agnosticism becomes the 
negation of philosophy. 

Spencer’s phil »sophy seems on the whole to be a species of Nat- 
uralism, since the world is explained as merely the redistribution 
of Matter, Motisn, and Force; but he never made it very clear 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 111 


just how the mind is related to this trinity, sometimes trying to 
find the ultimate elements of mind in the nervous shock, but 
otherwise, and especially in his later writings, refusing to accept 
the materialistic imputation, expressly saying at the close of his 
First Principles that the reasoning contained in his pages affords 
no support to either of the two rival hypotheses called Material- 
ism and Spiritualism. The materialist, seeing that feelings are 
transformable into an equivalent amount of mechanical motion, 
may conclude that the phenomena of consciousness are mate- 
rial phenomena. The spiritualist, setting out with the same 
data, may conclude that if the forces displayed by matter are 
cognizable only under the shape of equivalent amounts of con- 
_ sciousness, then these same forces when existing out of con- 
sciousness, are of the same intrinsic nature as when existing 
in consciousness. 

On the whole, although Spencer throws little light on the phi- 
losophy of evolution for us, nevertheless he had an immense influ- 
ence in the nineteenth century in extending the idea of evolution 
itself and applying it to every branch of knowledge. It was this 
as well as his valuable contributions to special subjects, such as 
ethics, religion, psychology, education, that made him one of the 
great thinkers of the nineteenth century. 


Organic evolution 

The history of the doctrine of organic evolution goes back to 
the ancient Greeks. Aristotle not only taught the doctrine of 
evolution, but he had, what Darwin lacked, a theory of its 
causes. Lucretius, the Roman poet, gives a somewhat complete 
picture of the gradual development of animal life from the simple 
first beginnings and even anticipated the theory of the survival 
of the fittest. 

In modern times evolutionary views were freely advanced in 
the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the 
nineteenth. In these years a long list of writers, among whom 
was the poet Goethe, anticipated the theory of organic evolution, 
that animal species have a common ancestry, «aid have arisen by 
a process of gradual change from simpler an‘ .ate forms. The 


112 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


theory was held by Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, be- 
fore the close of the eighteenth century. 


Lamarck 

It was Lamarck, however, the famous French naturalist, who 
at the opening of the nineteenth century first formulated a com- 
plete theory of species transformation. But Lamarck’s explana- 
tion of the origin of new species was radically different from that 
which afterwards became famous as Darwinism. Lamarck’s 
view is both interesting and important, because it has to some 
extent been revived in our own time, when the difficulties in Dar- 
win’s theory have become recognized. Furthermore, it seems to 
be the more natural and easy method for explaining the changes 
which have taken place in plants and animals. Lamarck sup- 
posed that the environment modifies individual organisms and 
that the modifications thus produced are transmitted by the or- 
ganisms to their offspring. In the case of animals he recognized 
also the modifying effect of use and disuse of bodily organs and 
the influence of effort and desire on the part of the animal. 
Since, now, the modifications which result from the action of the 
environment and from use and disuse are said to be passed on by 
inheritance, his theory involves the inheritance of acquired charm 
acters, a phrase which has become famous, leading to a century- 
long dispute. If we may suppose that such changes take place in 
animal bodies and may be passed on to the offspring by inher- 
itance, the whole plan of evolution becomes much simpler. 

Thus suppose, to take the classical instance, the giraffe or the 
ancestors of the giraffe, once did not have long necks. The con- 
stant stretching of the neck to get the tender leaves at the tops 
of the trees would elongate it. This elongation would be inher- 
ited by the next generation. In this way changes of all kinds 
might take place in the bodily structure of animals or in their 
habits, even to the forming of new species. 

We could easily see how, for instance, the peculiar structure of 
the hind legs of the cat, admirably fitted for jumping upon her 
prey, and of the shorter, stiffer forelegs, fitted for receiving her. 
weight after the jump, has come about simply by modifications 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 113 


due to the practice of jumping; and the new practice of jumping 
might itself be explained by a change in the environment in 
which the cat lives, such as a necessitated change in the food sup- 
ply. But Lamarck seems also to think that there are deep de- 
sires or ‘‘needs”’ in the organism resulting from internal forces 
tending toward development. 

To the beginner in these studies Lamarck’s theory of evolu- 
tion seems very natural and convincing. It seems reasonable 
that the action of the environment should constantly be modify- 
ing habits and structure, and that an animal or man could, ac- 
cording to his desire, by use or disuse of any organ, gradually 
change its structure or function, and, furthermore, that these 
modifications could be transmitted to the next generation, thus 
perhaps finally effecting radical changes, even to the production 
of new species. 


The inheritance of acquired characters 

But it will be seen that Lamarck’s theory, captivating as it is, 
rests upon a certain assumption, and herein lies the difficulty. 
It rests upon the assumption that modifications of structure ac- 
quired during the life of an individual can be passed on by inher- 
itance to his offspring. This inheritance of acquired characters 
has in modern times come to be doubted, both because it is im- 
possible to explain theoretically how it could occur and because 
there is very little actual evidence that it does occur. Cut off 
dogs’ tails for as many generations as you please and breed from 
the tailless dogs — but the pups will be born with tails. 

If, then, modifications in the structure and habits of animals 
cannot be passed on by inheritance, how in the world can we 
explain evolution? Animal species would seem to remain un- 
changed from generation to generation; as indeed outwardly 
they appear to. Now, although Darwin himself did have a 
limited belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, never- 
theless his theory of evolution gets along without it. Presently 
we shall see how Darwin thinks this wonderful thing is accom- 
plished — by small chance variations and natural selection. 

- But first a word more ought to be said about the inheritance of 


114 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


acquired characters. At first sight it appears wholly reasonable 
that such characters should be inherited and even to be borne out 
by daily observation. Are not the sons of blacksmiths sturdy 
and the sons and daughters of musicians musical, and are not 
these and many other qualities inherited from parents who have 
acquired them? If by diligent and persistent effort through the 
years of my youth and manhood I strengthen my muscles, 
heart, or lungs, increase my skill of hand or foot, improve my 
voice, cultivate my taste, purify my morals, may I not hand 
these acquirements on to my children? Yes, but it will be by 
social inheritance, not by biological inheritance. Biologically 
the physical and mental equipment of the child is the same as 
that with which his father started, not the same as that with 
which his father ended, save only by such individual differences 
as are due to what are called variations, coming, it is be- 
lieved, from internal causes. If at first it seems rather dis- 
couraging to learn that our dearly earned virtues cannot be 
handed on to our children, we may at least take some comfort 
from the fact that our acquired vices are not handed on either; 
but in either case this is only a half truth, for in such matters 
social inheritance is of the utmost importance. We may be very 
sure that our children and our grandchildren will inherit by im- 
itation, association, and instruction both our acquired virtues 
and vices, but at birth they will start where their parents 
started. Ifthe sons of blacksmiths are sturdy and the children 
of musicians musical, it is because these qualities run in these 
families, not because the parents have acquired them by practice 
or exercise. | 

It should be said, however, that biologists are not now wholly 
agreed about the non-inheritance of acquired characters, and the 
subject is again under investigation, the interest in it being re- 
newed owing to the difficulties which have arisen in the alter- 
native Darwinian hypothesis. Ingenious researches are being 
made in many laboratories in the attempt to unravel this knotty 
and puzzling problem, with results which by no means confirm us 
in the old belief that bodily modification can have no effect upon 
the germ-plasm and cannot to some degree be inherited. In 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 115 


other words, many cases of the apparent inheritance of acquired 
characters are reported. At any rate, the evidence is sufficient 
to warrant the revival of Lamarck’s theory of evolution as a pos- 
sible rival of Darwin’s view. Even the other supposition upon 
which Lamarck’s theory rests, namely, that there are deep de- 
sires or needs in the organism which influence development, is by 
no means universally condemned now. So we hear at the pres- 
ent time of a school of evolutionists called the neo-Lamarckians, 
who do not believe that Darwin’s theory of natural selection will 
satisfactorily explain all changes in animal species and who are 
partially returning to Lamarck’s views. 


_ Darwinism 

Charles Darwin was born in 1809 and died in 1882. His Orv- 
gin of Species was published in 1859 and his Descent of Man in 
1871. In the history of science Darwin’s work ranks in impor- 
tance with that of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, in giving 
new direction to human thought and stimulating scientific re- 
search. It is true that nearly all the fundamental principles of 
Darwin’s new science had been anticipated by other workers, but 
it was his patient and painstaking research and the clear formula- 
tion of his theory, which launched it upon the world as a new sci- 
entific view. It is perhaps true that Darwin’s method is more 
valuable than his theory of evolution; being a perfect example of 
the inductive method, coupled with inexhaustible patience in 
research and experimentation, and associated with the utmost 
candor, honesty, and mental grace. After an initial draft of his 
theory in 1842, Darwin deferred its publication for seventeen 
years, during which time the theory of natural selection was in- 
dependently discovered by his friend, Alfred Russel Wallace. 
Acrimony, however, and jealousy were qualities unknown to 
these searchers after truth. 

The mere machinery of Darwinism, though familiar to every 
one, may be briefly summarized. Every species of animal is 
enormously prolific, tending to increase in geometrical ratio. 
There is a certain kind of codfish which produces 200,000,000 
eggs. It has been estimated that a single dandelion plant, 


116 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


should all its seeds mature, would in the fourth generation pro- 
duce plants enough to cover a land area 245 times greater than 
that of the United States. A single bacterium might produce a 
million bacteria in a day,! and Linnzeus said that three flies 
could consume the carcass of a horse as speedily as a lion could. 

Since, then, plant and animal species are so prolific, there is 
neither room nor food enough for all. Hence there follows a 
struggle for existence, in which there will be a survival of the fittest. 
Who are the fittest? Those individuals best adapted to the en- 
vironment. Why should there be any difference in this respect 
between individuals? Because of slight variations in structure or 
function between individuals of the same species, even those 
born of the same parents. Like begets like, but not just like. 
Those having favorable variations will be selected and preserved. 
This is called natural selection. They will live, thrive, and 
propagate, probably transmitting their favorable variations to 
their offspring. The less favored ones will perish. Gradually, 
in this way, there will be a modification of structure and in time 
a modification so great as to result ina new species. The sharp 
tooth, the tearing claw, the horny hide, the warm fur, all are use- 
ful in the desperate battle of life with enemies and elements, and 
all have arisen by slight accidental variations selected and pre- 
served by heredity. Among birds that did not migrate, some in- 
dividuals accidentally migrating would find more abundant food, 
would live and thrive and transmit this new peculiarity to their 
offspring. Thus instincts arise. Even the human eye, the great- 
est wonder of adaptation, might so arise from a single group of 
cells sensitive to light, thus warning the fortunate possessors of 
this variation of danger or prey. 

If the difference between Lamarck’s theory,and that of Darwin 
is not entirely clear to the reader, it will become so if we use again 
the illustration of the peculiar structure of the hind legs of the 
cat. With Lamarck, individual cats actually change the struc- 
ture of their legs by constant jumping after their prey, and these 
changes are passed on by inheritance and added to by the next 
generation. With Darwin the change is not due to practice, but 

1 See William M. Goldsmith, The Laws of Life, p. 186, 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 117 


is an accidental one, having its origin in internal causes in the 
germ-plasm of the individual. Some cat was born with a varia- 
tion in the structure of the legs favorable to jumping. In the 
struggle for existence such an individual would have an advan- 
tage over others of its kind owing to this modification. While its 
competitors in the struggle might die, such an individual would 
live and prosper and pass on to’its offspring this favorable 
variation, since it was due to an inner factor and would be 
heritable. 

This, then, is the celebrated Darwinian theory of the evolution 
of plant and animal species. The theory is ingenious — even 
fascinating. It will be noticed that it does not depend upon 
_ the modifying action of the environment, nor upon the modi- 
fying effect of use and disuse, nor does it involve the inherit- 
ance of-acquired characters. It assumes only the occurrence of 
small variations, which might be accidental, and the preserva- 
tion of the favorable ones by natural selection. Certainly such 
variations do occur and surely natural selection would seem to 
preserve them. What the student of philosophy wishes to know, 
however, is whether the theory will really work. Will it explain 
the origin of new species and will it explain the progressive devel- 
opment of species from the simplest micro-organisms to the won- 
derful complexity of the human body, and, most important of 
all, will it explain the coming of intelligence and the human 
mind? And finally, 7f Darwin’s theory will explain all these, 
then just what assumptions are involved in it? What does 
Darwin take for granted and what does he explain? 


The assumptions in Darwinism 

Leaving for the moment the question whether Darwin’s theory 
will work, let us notice the assumptions upon which it is based. 
It depends primarily upon four great principles, varzation, hered- 
ity, the struggle for existence, and natural selection. A fifth princi- 
ple, the survival of the fittest, is implied in the fourth. The as- 
sumption of these four principles does not weaken Darwin’s the- 
ory, because they are all valid assumptions. They are truths. 
The biologist, interested merely in the origin of species, need not 


118 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


hesitate over these assumptions, though he may question very 
much whether they will work to produce new species. But the 
student of philosophy, interested in understanding the world, 
must hesitate over them, not in the way of doubt, but in the 
way of wonder. Why the struggle for existence? Why varia- 
tion and why heredity? 

To those who have been led to believe that Darwinism is a 
kind of explanation of our human world, it will come as a sur- 
prise, if not as a kind of shock, to learn that Darwinism rests 
upon these unexplained assumptions. It may seem that if one 
really wishes to understand the world of living organisms cul- 
minating in man, the peculiarly interesting and determinative 
things are just these initial assumptions, namely, the struggle for 
existence, variation, and heredity, rather than the mere mecha- 
nism by which, granting these assumptions, natural selection 
works to modify species. Let us, then, examine these four prin- 
ciples, mentioning first the struggle for existence and reserving 
for fuller treatment the assumptions which form the framework 
of Darwin’s scheme, namely, variation, heredity and natural 
selection. 


The struggle for existence 

The careless reader of Darwin might think that the struggle 
for existence is explained by the fact that more individuals are 
born than there is room or food for; but of course this explana- 
tion assumes the activity, insurgency, and spontaneity which be- 
long to alllife. If, then, one would really seek for an explanation 
of evolution, if one would hope to understand the progressive un- 
folding of living forms and functions culminating in the supreme 
intelligence of man, the secret would seem to lie rather in the in- 
surgency of life than in the action of a negative principle like nat- 
ural selection. One would say, ‘‘ Right here lies the secret and 
the explanation of evolution — in the very nature of life, in the 
will to live, in the primordial impulse, push, appetency, desire, 
aspiration, or whatever it is, which is life itself.”” Granting this, 
the mere machinery of evolution, Darwinian or other, is of less 
interest. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 119 


Variation 

Much the same interest attaches to the second principle in 
Darwin’s scheme, namely, variation. Concerning the causes of 
variation, Darwin said that our ignorance is profound. Varia- 
tions are constantly spoken of as chance or fortuitous varia- 
tions, by which is meant, of course, not that they have no cause, 
but that they are not directed to any end; and the real signifi- 
cance of Darwin’s hypothesis for philosophy lies, no doubt, in 
this, that granting such chance variations, and granting also he- 
redity and the struggle for existence, it would be possible to ex- 
plain the origin of species and all the wonderful adaptations which 
we see in the animal world without the assumption of any teleo- 
—logicalfactor. Jf the struggle for existence is in the nature of a 
mere blind push, 7f variations occur which are purely fortuitous, 
and if the forces of heredity are taken for granted, then it would 
be possible, it is said, to explain plant and animal species, 
with all their adaptations, instincts, intelligence, and reason, 
through the action of natural selection alone. The significance 
of Darwinism is seen just here; and it is this mechanistic aspect 
of the theory, no doubt, rather than the innocent doctrine of the 
descent of man, which has given it a degree of philosophical 
importance. 

But since Darwin’s time the difficulties of explaining evolution 
by means of small chance variations have steadily increased. 
Less and less emphasis is placed on the fortuitous character of 
the variations, and indeed less and less importance is given to the 
variations themselves. Grave doubts have arisen whether ani- 
mal species could have arisen through the natural selection of 
small variations. 


The truth of the general principle of the survival of the fittest is quite 
untouched by recent criticism; but a great deal of argument has been 
expended over the questions: (1) how much fitness is sufficient to lead to 
survival, and (2) whether very small advantages in the way of fitness, 
even if they lead to the survival of the individuals which exhibit them, 
will be followed to an indefinite extent in succeeding generations by 
further improvements in the same direction. We shall find that a good 
deal of evidence has accumulated tending to show that the second of 


120 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


these questions must be answered in the negative, although the point is 
not yet settled to the satisfaction of every one.} 


Difficulties 

It is always a profitable experiment for those who may be in- 
terested in testing the Darwinian hypothesis to try to apply it to 
specific cases. Variations, as Darwin thinks, are preserved be- 
cause they are useful. ‘They must therefore be useful when they 
first appear. But in a vast number of cases this could not be 
true; and yet according to Darwin, the slightest variation in 
order to be preserved must be of advantage in the struggle 
for existence. 

In another class of cases not subject to this difficulty, the ap- 
plication of Darwin’s theory simply taxes the imagination to 
such a degree as to cause one to lose faith in it or to look desper- 
ately around for some other theory. Such are the instances of 
very complicated instincts like those of the yucca moth or of the 
migratory eels. Under this class of difficulties come the cases of 
very complex adaptations in the structure and function of animal 
bodies. Almost any illustration here might be used, but let us 
take, for instance, that of the function of the adrenal glands, first 
fully described by Cannon.? These glands are situated anterior 
to the kidneys, and under the influence of certain emotions, par- 
ticularly fear and anger, secrete and throw into the circulation of 
the blood a certain substance called adrenin. Now, when an 
animal is experiencing the emotion of fear or anger, the occasion 
is probably a critical one, in which his life is threatened and must 
be preserved either by combat or flight. In either case unusual 
muscular power will be needed and possibly blood may flow 
threatening weakness or death. Now, it happens (shall we say?) 
that the effect of adrenin in the blood is, first, to cause the latter 
to be drawn away from the stomach and intestines to the pe- 
ripheral muscles. In the present crisis digestion may wait, but 
the muscular system must function at its best. Adrenin, how- 


1 Robert Heath Lock, Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and 
Evolution (E. P. Dutton and Company), chap. 11, p. 49. 

2 Walter B. Cannon, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage, chaps. 
Iv-x. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 121 


ever, though it lessens the activity of the stomach, does not les- 
sen that of the heart, lungs, or brain; they will all be needed 
at their best. Second, adrenin causes an increase of secretion 
of blood sugar by the liver, furnishing an increased supply of 
quickly available energy; and, third, it causes an increased coag- 
ulation of the blood when exposed to the air, lessening the danger 
from bleeding. How all these amazing interlocking adapta- 
tions could have arisen by small chance variations in the course 
of ages the reader may try to imagine if he can. If it be possible, 
a, question will arise whether other explanations may not be more 
probable. John Burroughs says: 


Try to think of that wonderful organ, the eye, with all its marvelous 
- powers and adaptations, as the result of what we call chance or Natural 
Selection.. Well may Darwin have said that the eye made him shudder 
when he tried to account for it by Natural Selection. Why, its adapta- 
tions in one respect alone, minor though they be, are enough to stagger 
any number of selectionists. I refer to the rows of peculiar glands that 
secrete an oily substance, differing in chemical composition from any 
other secretion, a secretion which keeps the eyelids from sticking to- 
gether in sleep. 


Orthogenesis 

On the whole we may say that, despite the loyalty of the neo- 
Darwinians, Darwin’s theory —at any rate in its stricter form — 
has been steadily losing ground since the close of the last century. 
Many who still hold to the validity of the method of natural se- 
lection by small variations believe that these variations have not 
taken place in a haphazard manner, as strict Darwinism would 
seem to require, but in certain definite directions. The doctrine 
of Orthogenesis is the name given to this view. It means that 
variations are determinate, and that there is a certain definite di- 
rection in evolution. It is as if the variations or the mutations 
were tending, leaning, bending, so to speak, in certain definite 
predetermined directions; that is, it is not simply as if Nature 
were expanding, swelling, growing, but as if she were going some- 
where. 


1 John Burroughs, ‘‘A Critical Glance into Darwin,” The Atlantic Monthly, 
August, 1920, p. 239. 


122 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Since Darwin’s time evidence has accumulated which shows that 
variations are more definite than used to be supposed. The paleontolo- 
gists, who work out long series of fossils, bring forward cases of what 
looks like steady progress in a definite direction. There is a striking 
absence of what one might call arrows shot at a venture. It looks as if 
the occurrence of the new were limited by what has gone before, just as 
the architecture of a building that has been erected determines in some 
measure the style of any addition. An organic new departure will tend 
to be more or less congruent with what has been previously established. 
In post-Darwinian days the element of the fortuitous has shrunk. 


Some such view as this was held also by Nageli and the Rus- 
sian botanist, Korschinsky. ‘‘ Nageli believes that animals and 
plants would have developed about as they have even had no 
struggle for existence taken place and the climatic and geologic 
conditions and changes been quite different from what they ac- 
tually have been.” 


Korschinsky says: “In order to explain the origin of higher forms 
out of lower, it is necessary to assume in the organism a special ten- 
dency towards progress.”” That is, to the believers in this kind of a 
theory of orthogenesis organic evolution has been and is now ruled by 
unknown inner forces inherent in organisms, and has been independent 
of the influence of the outer world. The lines of evolution are im- 
manent, unchangeable, and ever slowly stretch toward some ideal goal.? 


While this extreme form of orthogenesis is repudiated by Kellogg 
and would be received with caution if not with skepticism by 
most evolutionists, since it introduces a mystic factor not ac- 
ceptable in science, still some kind of orthogenesis is favor- 
ably received by an increasingly large number of biologists 
to-day. 


Mutations 

It is partly owing to the difficulty in explaining evolution 
through the accumulation of small variations that so much inter- 
est has been aroused by the theory of mutations. De Vries, the 
Dutch botanist, experimenting with the evening primrose, found 


1 “How Darwinism Stands To-day.”’ (Quoted by permission from The Out- 
line of Science, edited by J. Arthur Thomson, vol. 11, p. 371. 4 vols. New York, 
G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1922.) 

2 Vernon L. Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day (Henry Holt and Company), p. 278. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 123 


that new types suddenly appeared, these types breeding true. 
To these sudden decisive changes, he gave the name ‘‘muta- 
tions,” to distinguish them from the slight changes, called ‘‘ vari- 
ations,” which Darwin had emphasized. The distinction be- 
tween variations and mutations had not been made in Darwin’s 
time, and perhaps under the term ‘‘variations”’ he intended to 
include both.? 

To some extent the mutation theory has supplanted the theory 
of small fortuitous variations. If, however, species change by 
sudden mutations, what is the cause of the mutations? It seems 
more difficult to think of mutations as occurring by chance than 
to think of variations as so occurring. In fact, as has been 
- pointed out by M. Caullery, Professor of Biology at the Sor- 
bonne, a certain dilemma has arisen in the theory of evolution 
just in this connection. Recent studies in genetics seem to indi- 
cate that fluctuations (variations), while produced under the in- 
fluence of the environment, are not hereditary, and that muta- 
tions, while hereditary, are not directly dependent upon the 
environment.” It is, of course, too soon to know whether these 
results will be confirmed. But if they are, it will strengthen the 
belief of those who accept some internal factor determining the 
mutations themselves. 

It should, of course, be understood that the mutation theory is 
not another theory of evolution. It is merely Darwinism over 
again, emphasizing the importance of natural selection. It es- 
capes some of the difficulties which arise in the action of natural 
selection upon small variations, but it encounters others beside 
the ones just mentioned. It is much more difficult than is the 
theory of small variations to apply to complex adaptations like 
those of the endocrine glands, or to the behavior of the migratory 


1Jn present-day biology the nomenclature is somewhat different. No sharp 
distinction is made between hereditary variations and mutations. There is a 
tendency to use the word ‘‘mutation”’ for all variations that are heritable, be 
they large or small. They are supposed to have their cause, not in environ- 
mental influences, but in germinal development, and they are discontinuous and 
may be the ground of change in species. Variations which are due to the action 
of the environment and are not heritable may be called “fluctuations.” 

2M. Caullery, ‘‘The Present State of the Problem of Evolution,” Annual 
Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1916, p. 382. 


124 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


eels described by Professor Thomson.! The sudden appearance 
of any of these things seems very difficult to explain. 


Heredity 

We have seen that like begets like, but not just like, and we 
have seen that Darwin’s plan of evolution depends upon these 
slight variations, which are themselves not understood. But 
why in general does like beget like? The only reason for intro- 
ducing this problem of heredity here is to correct the popular im- 
pression that since Darwin’s time biologists have unraveled this 
mystery. 

The fact of heredity is so familiar to us that we forget the 
amazing wonder of it. Think of those tiny bits of matter, the 
seeds of our common garden flowers. Many of the different 
kinds look much alike. Some of them are so small that they can 
hardly be distinguished by the eye. In each one is a germ cell, 
and from that cell springs a new plant, repeating in a thousand 
minute details the mother plant from which the seed came. 
And then the plant produces a flower just like the flower of last 
summer, and then from the flowers come a host of tiny seeds, 
each one again possessing the same marvelous potencies. Does 
the seed “‘remember’”’ the form of the parent flower? How does 
it all happen? 

If this is hard to understand, think of the human body with its 
almost infinite complexity. Think of the details of one single or- 
gan like the eye or the marvelously complicated structure of the 
brain; and then recall that the human organism has the power 
of reproduction, creating millions of tiny specks of protoplasm 
which may become egg cells, each one of which has the potency, 
when properly fertilized by a still more minute sperm cell, of pro- 
ducing another human form, slowly maturing during a score of 
years, and resembling when mature the parent form in all its 
wonderful details, and even repeating a host of little habits and 
mannerisms belonging to the particular individual or family from 
which it sprang. Language fails to give any adequate idea of the 
miracle of biological inheritance. One has only to think hard 

1 J. Arthur Thomson, An Introduction to Science, p. 148. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 125 


about it and try to imagine how an animal body with its poten- 
tial instincts and intelligence comes from an egg cell of micro- 
scopic size. 

Weismann’s theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm seems 
to throw light on the mystery of heredity and in popular belief is 
thought actually to explain it. The theory is clearly set forth in 
the following quotation: 


The fundamental hereditary relation is such that like tends to beget 
like, and the reason for this is found in the fact of germinal continuity. 
As long ago as 1875, Galton pointed out that there is a sense in which the 
child is as old as the parent; for when the parent’s body is developing 
from the fertilized ovum, a residue of unaltered germinal material is 
kept apart to form the reproductive cells, one of which may become the 
- starting-point of a child. This idea has been independently expressed 
and more fully developed by Weismann, who states it thus: ‘‘ In develop- 
ment a part of the germ-plasm (i.e., the essential germinal material) 
contained in the parent egg-cell is not used up in the construction of the 
body of the offspring, but is reserved unchanged for the formation of the 
germ-cells of the following generation.’”’ In many cases the future repro- 
ductive cells are visibly set apart at a very early stage before the divi- 
sion of labour in body-making has more than begun; in other cases 
where the future reproductive cells are not visible till much later, we 
argue by analogy that they are reproductive cells because they have not 
shared in body-making, but have kept intact the protoplasmic equip- 
ment — the full inheritance — of the original fertilized ovum. Thus 
the parent is rather the trustee of the germ-plasm than the producer of 
the child. In a new sense the child is “‘a chip of the old block.” The 
clarifying and corroboration of this doctrine of germinal continuity has 
been one of the most important steps of post-Darwinian biology. It 
enables us to understand why like tends to beget like.} 


Of course, neither the authors of the above quotation nor 
Weismann himself intended to convey the impression that hered- 
ity itself is explained by the fact that some of the germ-plasm is 
actually continued from generation to generation. What we are 
apt to forget is that in both parent and child the amount of 
germ-plasm is constantly increased by the division of the germ 
cells, and in this cell division the fundamental mystery of hered- 
ity is packed. It is doubtless true that many an audience listen- 
ing to the lecturer explaining the continuity of the germ-plasm 

1 Geddes and Thomson, Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), pp. 114, 115. 


126 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


and the wonderful Mendelian laws has a dim idea that heredity 
has been explained, though the speaker had no thought of con- 
veying that impression. 

As regards the continuity of the germ-plasm, the matter may 
be made clear as follows: Put a pair of mice ina granary. Each 
mouse has a certain amount of germ-plasm in its organism. 
Some of this may be transmitted to the offspring. But ina short 
period there will be one hundred mice from the pair and each of 
these will have as much of this germinal material as the original 
parents. Evidently the original amount of germ-plasm has been 
multiplied by fifty, the new parts “‘inheriting”’ all the peculiari- 
ties of the original. Put in this way, we can see that heredity is 
not explained by the theory of the continuity or immortality of 
the germ-plasm. ) 

Thus the “continuity of the germ-plasm”’ does not explain in- 
heritance. For when we come to think of it, nothing could be 
continuous from generation to generation except the process and 
the form; and to say that the form is continuous is just to say in 
other words that the child resembles the parent. In other words, 
heredity isresemblance. Even if the identical egg cell were actu- 
ally passed on from generation to generation, which, of course, 
could not happen, since any individual may produce thousands or 
millions of egg cells, we should still have to explain how the body 
cells of the child are moulded into a form almost exactly like that 
of the parent. The theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm 
makes it easier for us to understand how successive generations 
remain essentially the same, because they spring from similar 
germ-plasm — not from the same; but when we say similar germ- 
plasm, we are assuming the whole mystery of heredity. 

Neither should we allow ourselves to think that the new know- 
ledge of the structure of the cell has explained the mystery of 
heredity. In the last analysis we can see the chromosomes and 
chromomeres dividing into two, but we do not know why the 
new elements possess the properties of the old. 

As for the Mendelian laws of heredity, showing how the charac- 
ters are distributed among the offspring through successive gen- 
erations, the discovery of these laws was of tremendous interest 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 127 


to the geneticist, but of course no biologist ever put forth the 
claim that Mendel explained why the child resembles the parents. 
Not only have the Mendelian laws not explained heredity, but 
they have proved an actual embarrassment in applying the Dar- 
winian theory of evolution. As Caullery says, ‘‘But if we return 
now to the study of evolution, the data of Mendelism embar- 
rass us also very considerably. All that it shows us, in fact, is 
the conservation of existing properties. Many variations which 
might have seemed to be new properties are simply traced to pre- 
viously unobserved combinations of factors already existing.”’ ! 
There is thus a certain evasiveness about the doctrine of hered- 
ity, as there is about variation and the struggle for existence. 
As marshaled forward in the Darwinian theory, the extent of the 
assumptions is concealed by the familiarity of the phrases. 


Natural selection 

Natural selection, with its implied survival of the fittest, is as 
we have seen the fourth of the postulates upon which Darwin’s 
theory rests. But the same difficulties do not arise in the case of 
natural selection as in the case of the struggle for existence, varia- 
tion, and heredity. There is nothing difficult to explain about 
natural selection, as there is about the others, but, on the other 
hand, there is nothing in it of great help to the searcher after the 
philosophy of evolution. It was Darwin’s peculiar distinction to 
point out the working of natural selection; and the value of this 
discovery has rarely been questioned among modern evolution- 
ists, though it is now believed that the importance of it has been 
overestimated. 

But just what is the philosophical significance of natural selec- 
tion? What light does it throw upon the apparently upward 
trend of evolution, upon the successive steps in increased com- 
plexity of organisms, upon the growing differentiation of parts, 
upon the appearance of instinct, and intelligence? 

The reason that the full difficulties in the Darwinian hypothe- 
sis have not been appreciated is that the popular mind is prone to 
personify natural selection, to think of it as some kind of intelli- 

1M. Caullery, loc. cit., p. 333. 


128 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


gent direction of affairs, to think of it as using strategy, so to 
speak, as selecting, nursing, encouraging, promoting; in other 
words, to think of it, as many people do of natural laws, as some 
kind of force or agency, by which evolution is accomplished. 
“What is called Darwinism,” says John Burroughs, ‘‘is entirely 
an anthropomorphic view of Nature — Nature humanized and 
doing as man does. What is called Natural Selection is man’s 
selection read into animate nature.” 4 

When we come to realize that natural selection is not an 
agency of any kind, that it is merely the name of a certain sifting 
process in nature which checks the insurgency of life, then we be- 
gin to understand how little enlightenment has come to the stu- 
dent of philosophy from this source. Some one has said that nat- 
ural selection is really natural rejection; but the trouble is that 
either word, selection or rejection, implies to the uninitiated 
some sort of intelligent inspection, appraisement, and final deci- 
sion. Now, that the whole evolutionary process does imply 
some appraisement of values, at least some strategy seems the 
more evident the more we study it; but let us get out of our minds 
the notion that natural selection is such an appraising or strategi- 
calagency. Natural selection merely sifts out those individuals 
who are not so peculiarly fitted to the environment as to survive 
in the struggle. If we could think of natural selection as a kind 
of policeman who guards the door of evolution and knocks on the 
head all who do not present themselves with a new and better 
equipment for the strife, even then the secret of evolution will be 
found, not in the obstructing policeman, but tn the genius of the 
individuals who devise the new equipment. But we may not even 
think of natural selection as such an intelligent sorter of the fit 
from the unfit, as we have in artificial breeding of domestic ani- 
mals. All the individuals pass through the gate and the unfit 
die of starvation. Evidently we must look elsewhere than to 
natural selection for the springs of progress and the source and 
secrets of evolution. 

And that is all there is to Natural Selection. It is a name for a pro- 
cess of elimination which is constantly going on in animate nature all 

1 John Burroughs, loc. cit., p. 242. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 129 


about us. It is in no sense creative, it originates nothing, but clinches 
and toughens existing forms. ... What I mean to say is that there must 
be the primordial tendency to development which Natural Selection is 
powerless to beget, and which it can only speed up or augment. It can- 
not give the wing to the seed, or the spring, or the hook; or the feather 
to the bird; or the scale to the fish; but it can perfect all these things. 
The fittest of its kind does stand the best chance to survive.! 


To the student of philosophy, therefore, keen to know some- 
thing of the real secrets of evolution, the principle of natural 
selection is a distinct disappointment. His interest turns away 
from this negative blocking process to the force or the genius or 
the strategy which provides individuals with the new equipment, 
enabling them to elude the destructive power of competition. 
Neither is any help promised from the principle of the survival of 
the fittest, a phrase first used by Herbert Spencer, since this is 
merely another way of expressing the action of natural selection. 
It does not mean that those individuals who are absolutely the 
fittest — that is, the best — survive, but those whose qualities 
best fit their possessors to the immediate environment. 


The unknown causes of evolution 

The disappointment which the philosopher feels in Darwinism 
because of its failure to throw any light on his real problems is 
shared by many biologists of the present day, although for an- 
other reason. They find its results disappointing in the pri- 
mary purpose which Darwin had in view, namely, the explana- 
tion of the origin of species. 


When students of other sciences ask us what is now currently be- 
lieved about the origin of species we have no clear answer to give. Faith 
has given place to agnosticism, for reasons which on such an occasion as 
this we may profitably consider... . 

We cannot see how the variation into species came about. Varia- 
tions of many kinds, often considerable, we daily witness, but no origin 
of species. ... 

In dim outline evolution is evident enough. But that particular and 
essential bit of theory of evolution, which is concerned with the origin 
and nature of species remains utterly mysterious... . 


1 John Burroughs, loc. cit., pp. 246, 247. 


130 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


The claims of natural selection as the chief factor in the determination 
of species have consequently been discredited.} 


Natural selection remains still a vera causa in the origin of species; but 
the function ascribed to it is practically reversed. It exchanges its 
former supremacy as the supposed sole determinant among practically 
indefinite possibilities of structure and function, for the more modest 
position of simply accelerating, retarding or terminating the process of 
otherwise determined change. It furnished the brake rather than the 
steam or the rails for the journey of life; or in better metaphor, instead 
of guiding the ramifications of the tree of life, it would, in Mivart’s ex- 
cellent phrase, do little more than apply the pruning-knife to them. In 
other words, its functions are mainly those of the third Fate, not the 
first; of Siva, not of Brahma.? 


The fair truth is that the Darwinian selection theories, considered 
with regard to their claimed capacity to be an independently sufficient 
mechanical explanation of descent, stand to-day seriously discredited in 
the biological world. On the other hand, it is also fair truth to say that 
no replacing hypothesis or theory of species-forming has been offered by 
the opponents of selection which has met with any general or even con- 
siderable acceptance by naturalists. Mutations seem to be too few and 
far between; for orthogenesis we can discover no satisfactory mechan- 
ism; and the same is true for the Lamarckian theories of modification by 
the cumulation, through inheritance, of acquired or ontogenic charac- 
ters. Kurz und gut, we are immensely unsettled.3 


Since Darwin’s day much has been added to our knowledge of the 
facts about the manner and the effect of evolution, but only two im- 
portant new alleged causal factors have been presented for considera- 
tion as primary causes of evolution; these are mutations and Mendelian. 
inheritance. Neither has had any general acceptance as sufficient ex- 
planation of either species-forming or adaptation, which are the co- 
ordinate fundamental problems of organic evolution. In this same 
post-Darwinian period, also, the two most important explanations of 
evolution current in Darwin’s time, namely, Lamarckism, or the in- 
heritance of acquired characters, and Darwinism, or natural and sexual 
selection, have been weakened rather than strengthened as sufficient 
causes of evolution. Hence we are in the curious position of knowing 
now much more about evolution than was known fifty and sixty years 
ago, but of feeling much less confident that we know the causes of 
evolution. 

1 William Bateson, Science, January 20, 1922. 

2 Geddes and Thomson, Evolution (Henry Holt and Carine p. 248. 


’ Vernon L. Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day (Henry Holt and Company), p. 5. 
4 Vernon L. Kellogg, ‘Where Evolution Stands To-day,” The New Republic, 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 131 


The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities of the movement 
of evolution, but not its general direction, still less the movement itself. 
The road that leads to the town is obliged to follow the ups and downs 
of the hills; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the acci- 
dents of the ground are not the cause of the road, nor have they given it 
its direction. At every moment they furnish it with what is indispensa- 
ble, namely, the soil on which it lies; but if we consider the whole of the 
road, instead of each of its parts, the accidents of the ground appear 
only as impediments or causes of delay, for the road aims simply at the 
town and would fain be a straight line. Just so as regards the evolution 
of life and the circumstances through which it passes — with this differ- 
ence, that evolution does not mark out a solitary route, that it takes 
directions without aiming at ends, and that it remains inventive even in 
its adaptations.! 


In contrast to the unity of opinion on the law of evolution is the wide 
diversity of opinion on the causes of evolution. In fact, the causes of 
the evolution of life are as mysterious as the law of evolution is 
certain. ... 

Our present state of opinion is this: we know to some extent how 
plants and animals and man evolve; we do not know why they 
evolve.... | 

Again, despite the powerful advocacy of pure Darwinism by Weis- 
mann and de Vries in the new turn that has been given to our search for 
causes by the rediscovery of the law of Mendel and the heredity doc- 
trines which group under MENDELISM, it may be said that Darwin’s 
law of selection as a natural explanation of the origin of all fitness in 
form and function has also lost its prestige at the present time, and all of 
Darwinism which now meets with universal acceptance is the law of the 
survival of the fittest, a limited application of Darwin’s great idea as 
expressed by Herbert Spencer.? 


April 11, 1923. Compare also the following from M. Caullery from a personal 
letter to the author dated Paris, May 6, 1922: ‘‘Je concluais donc que, dans le 
moment présent, l’évolution est la seule explication rationnelle des faits connus, 
et que ceux-ci la confirment de plus en plus, mais que nous étions encore com- 
plétement dans l’incertitude sur la facon dont elle s’était réalisée.”’ 

1 Bergson, Creative Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), p. 102. 

2 Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life (Charles Scribner’s 
Sons), pp. ix, x, xiv, xv. 

Perhaps the latter part of the above quotation does not fairly represent Os- 
born’s position. In later writing he clearly says that the mode of origin of 
species is now well known, although the cause of the origin of species is another 
matter and no adequate solution of this has been found. He thinks that Dar- 
win’s theory of selection rests upon stronger evidence now than in Darwin’s time 
and forms a partial solution of causation. Osborn also makes the observation, 
very interesting to students of philosophy, that species have not originated “‘ by 
chance or by accident, as Darwin at one time supposed, but through a continu- 


132 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Of course, other equally competent biologists are just as out- 
spoken in their belief in the adequacy of the principle of natural 
selection.. Their views are too well known to need quoting 
here. It is very apparent, however, that evolutionists are now 
emphasizing far more than formerly not only our ignorance of 
the causes of evolution, but also our uncertainty as to the way it 
has taken place. But all would agree upon the monumental 
importance of Darwin’s work, emphasizing the fact of evolution 
and discovering and explaining the réle of natural selection. He 
himself recognized very frankly the difficulties in the theory and 
even mentioned the possibility that much of his book might 
prove to be erroneous. 

Some evolutionists are, therefore, turning back to the theory 
of Lamarck, already mentioned, in spite of the difficulty about 
the inheritance of acquired characters. They are beginning to 
doubt whether animal species got “naturally selected without 
the trouble of thinking about it.”? 2 Others — and these are in 
the majority — unable at present to solve this larger problem of 
the origin of species, are turning their attention to specific and 
narrower problems in genetics. 


Creative evolution 

Meanwhile, is there any key to the problem of evolution which 
the student of philosophy may hope to find? Darwinism, as we 
have seen, does not provide this key. If the theory of Lamarck 
should furnish the ground for a future satisfactory explanation of 
evolution, it would still leave most of the problems facing the 
philosopher unsolved. Lamarck’s suggestion, that modification 
of structures in animal bodies is partly determined by use and 
disuse, and that use finds its root in the individual’s own desires, 


ous and well-ordered process.’? He even speaks of a spiritual principle in evolu- 
tion shown by ‘‘the evidence of beauty, of order, and of design in the daily myr- 
iad of miracles to which we owe our existence.’”’ See his Evolution and Religion, 
pp. 15, 17, and his article in Science, February 24, 1922, ‘‘ William Bateson on 
Darwinism.” 

1 See, for instance, the vigorous paper by C. C. Nutting in The Scientific 
Monthly, February, 1921, entitled ‘‘Is Darwin Shorn?”’ 

2 Compare the biting satire on Darwinism in the preface to Bernard Shaw’s 
Back to Methuselah. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 133 


does seem to offer one ray of hope. Perhaps, then, the struggle 
for existence may furnish a better key to the secret of evolution 
than natural selection. 

Of the four principles emphasized by Darwin, two — namely, 
heredity and natural selection — offer us nothing. Though the 
mystery of heredity is unsolved, yet it would help us little to 
solve it; for reproduction gives us only the old, while evolution 
presents us ever with the new. The survival of the fittest is a 
principle of immense interest to the sociologist, but it is ‘‘the ar- 
rival of the fittest’’ which we are now especially interested in. It 
is evidently, then, in variation and the struggle for existence that 
we are to find, if anywhere, the secrets of evolution. What we 
actually know about evolution is that there is a step-by-step 
progress from the lowest to the highest forms of life. We assume 
that it is a process of continuity, but what we actually see and 
know is not a process of continuity at all, nor even a process of 
growth; it is rather the successive appearance of new forms and 
functions. 

It seems more as if the new were buzlded on to the old, than as if 
the new were growing out of the old. If the new grows out of the 
old, as the word evolution would indeed strictly indicate, we 
should have to think of it as already potentially present in the 
old. Bateson, to be sure, in a much-heralded address some years 
ago, not perhaps intended too seriously, suggested, to the amaze- 
ment of his fellow biologists, just this theory of evolution, 
namely, that it is a process of unfoldment, the original amceba 
containing potentially the whole subsequent race of animals and 
men. Possibly it was not so much that there was any evidence 
for this view, as that it offered a means of escape from the difficul- 
ties arising in the Darwinian theory. Incredible as the unfolding 
theory would appear, it might seem to tax the imagination less 
than the theory of the mechanical selection of chance variations. 

But evolution does not seem like a process of unfoldment; it 
seems like a movement in the creation of new values. It seems 
more like the work of the artist, picturing ideals and then striv- 
ing to realize them. Inasense, perhaps, the picture was present 
in the mind of the artist, as the Woolworth Building was present 


134 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


in the mind of the architect; but the relation of the new to the old 
is expressed better in other terms than in those of unfoldment. 
The word epigenesis has been suggested as more appropriate 
than the word evolution; and recently Lloyd Morgan has pro- 
posed the term Emergent Evolution, which appears to be the 
most accurate of all. 

At any rate, evolution is creative, and “‘creative evolution”’ is 
a more fruitful phrase than ‘‘natural selection.”’ At every stage 
in evolution something new appears — life, intelligence, lan- 
guage, reason, science, social organization, morals, art. Nature 
in evolution seems to be aiming at something, at certain values 
— shall we say life, animal species, intelligence, consciousness? 
The appearance of opinions like the following in the biological lit- 
erature of the day shows how far we are getting from the old 
mechanistic conceptions of Darwinism: 

The problem of individuality of species is very difficult; but our view 
of Nature as a whole must take account of the fact that species are 
multitudinous and that they represent discontinuous individualities, 
with much more constancy than the earlier Darwinians supposed. 
Linnzeus said: ‘There are as many species as there were ideas in the 
Divine Mind,” and there is no doubt that a good species is like a clear- 
cut idea. At the other extreme of comparison, it is like a chemical ele- 
ment, but on a higher plane. As Goethe said: ‘‘The one thing Nature 
seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals.” 
If we personify “‘ Animate Nature,” it must at least be as an artist with 
inexhaustible imaginative resources, with extraordinary mastery of 
materials.! 


Only in some such way as this, perhaps, shall we be able to 
explain the appearance of the new at every stage of evolution. 

Here, of course, it will be objected that just as soon as we begin 
to speak of nature as ‘‘aiming at”’ something, or creating after 
the manner of an “artist,’”’? we are becoming anthropomorphic, 
reading into nature our own method of thought and action. 
But the point is that philosophy is an attempt to understand the 
world, and the method of understanding it by reducing it to such 
symbols as matter, motion, time, and space, has not met with the 


1 Quoted by permission from vol. m1 of The Outline of Science, edited by 
J. Arthur Thomson, p. 705. 4 vols. (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922.) 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 135 


expected success. Just why should a concept, if it is useful in 
helping us to understand the world process, be rejected because 
itisanthropomorphic? Is there really any more reason for so do- 
ing than there is for rejecting it because it is not anthropomor- 
phic? Possibly the concepts which we have at home are better 
than the foreign ones. Democritus, the Greek philosopher, said 
that the world is nothing but a process of motion among material 
atoms. But suppose that we say that it is a process of artistic 
creation or self-expression, have we any less right to this mode of 
thought or any less grounds for its truth? Jam not now propos- 
ing this as a new philosophy of evolution, but suggesting that 
some such direction of thought is becoming common. That 
many biologists are beginning to think in these terms we have 
seen in the preceding chapter. One writer even says, ‘‘ What are 
called variations and mutations in biological language are the or- 
ganism’s experiment in self-expression, and these are the raw 
materials of progress.”’ ! 

That space and time and matter and motion are real, I have no 
thought of denying; but that they are the only realities is by no 
means apparent. With them we can construct certain sciences 
very well; but such sciences are not the only ones. Possibly cer- 
tain concepts underlying biology and psychology, or even sociol- 
ogy, are just as ultimate as those at the root of physics and chem- 
istry. The whole process of evolution might be looked at in an 
entirely different way from our customary nineteenth-century 
manner. This was illustrated by Bateson’s suggestion that evo- 
lution might be a process of unfoldment. Although this has 
not commended itself either to biologists or to philosophers, it 
shows the possibility of using new concepts in the whole discus- 
sion. 


Emergent evolution 
This is illustrated also in a striking manner in the recent book 
of Lloyd Morgan, entitled Emergent Evolution, a book to which 
some reference was made in the preceding chapter. Here we 
have almost the first attempt, since Herbert Spencer, to outline a 
1 The Outline of Science, vol. 11, p. 369. 


136 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


real philosophy of evolution, instead of supplying, as other evolu- 
tionists have done, a mere formula or description of the several 
steps in development. Evolution, says Morgan, is a series of 
stages, in which there supervenes at each new level a new form 
of ‘‘relatedness’? — or, as we should say, perhaps, a new struc- 
ture or organization — and from this new form of relatedness 
something new ‘‘emerges,’’ which is effective in determining the 
““o of events”’ from that stage on. Thus, from matter emerges 
life, and from life, mind. The world is a pyramid with ascend- 
ing levels. 


Near its base is a swarm of atoms with relational structure and the 
quality we may call atomicity. Above this level, atoms combine to 
form new units, the distinguishing quality of which is molecularity; 
higher up, on one line of advance, are, let us say, crystals wherein atoms 
and molecules are grouped in new relations of which the expression is 
crystalline form; on another line of advance are organisms with a differ- 
ent kind of natural relations which give the quality of vitality; yet 
higher, a new kind of natural relatedness supervenes and to its expres- 
sion the word ‘‘mentality’”’ may, under safeguard from journalistic 
abuse, be applied.! ‘ 


But what causes the emergents to emerge? What is the 
agency which lifts the world, so to speak, from one level to the 
next? Here Morgan definitely takes his stand on the necessity 
of affirming a power which he calls Activity, or Mind, or God. 

For better or worse, while I hold that the proper attitude of natural- 
ism is strictly agnostic, therewith I, for one, cannot rest content. For 
better or worse, I acknowledge God as the Nisus through whose Activity 
emergents emerge, and the whole course of emergent evolution is di- 
rected. Such is my philosophic creed, supplementary to my scientific 
policy of interpretation. ? 


Evolution as strategy 

Another striking illustration of this tendency is seen in the 
recent book entitled The Grand Strategy of Evolution, by William 
Patten, Professor of Biology in Dartmouth College. The new 


1C. Lloyd Morgan, F.R.S., Emergent Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), 
p. 35. 
2 Loc. cit., p. 36. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 137 


view of evolution set forth in this book is of peculiar interest to 
the philosopher. Certainly evolution has all the appearance of 
being some kind of “strategy,’”’ but hitherto it has been custom- 
- ary to use all such words in a figurative sense, it being under- 
stood, of course, that it looks like strategy, but is really just 
mechanism. But in this book such terms are used in quite 
other than a figurative sense. In fact the view of evolution 
here set forth completely reverses our older ideas about it. The 
author sets out with a wholly different set of concepts, so differ- 
ent that it is hard at first to adjust ourselves to his new views — 
so habitually has our thought run in mechanistic Darwinian 
channels. 
In the first place, Patten thinks that the 


concept of a creative drift from the futile conflict of chaos toward a 
more stable structural organization and unity is the central idea of evo- 
lution, and the general recognition of this phenomenon is the distin- 
guishing characteristic of the scientific and intellectual thought of 
modern times.! 

Back of all evolutionary processes lies a universal compulsion to con- 
structive action.’ 


But it is not this nofion of evolution as a creative movement 
toward structure and organization which is the striking feature 
of Patten’s view; it is rather his further belief that this creative 
movement proceeds by the action of certain fundamental proper- 
ties of all life and mind — yes, even of all reality, namely, self- 
preservation, self-sacrifice, and coéperation. This is what he says: 


Natural selection and the survival of the fittest are perhaps the 
broadest terms used in the biological sciences, but the processes so 
designated have no creative value. The terms merely imply that a 
definite sequence of products ensues, or affirm the self-evident fact that 
something already created is selected for survival, or that it endures. 
They do not suggest how it was created, why it survives, or wherein its 
fitness lies. 

I shall try to show that there is but one answer to all these questions; 
that there is but one creative process common to all phases of evolution, 
inorganic, organic, mental, and social. That process is best described 
by the term codperation, or mutual service.* 


1 William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution (R. G. Badger), p. 44. 
2 Loc. cit., p. 129. 3 Loc. cit:, Pp.’ 32}'33. 


138 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


‘Creation is the birth of new things through the mutual serv- 
ices of preéxisting things.’”? Egoism, altruism, and service (co- 
operation) are therefore ultimate concepts, through which alone 
we can understand evolution. It is always the investment of 
self in a purpose beyond self which determines the evolutionary 
movement — that is, progress. Evolution consists in just this — 
that things brought together in a definite time and space relation 
act together codperatively; and as a result something new ap- 
pears, which could not otherwise exist, having new qualities. An 
atom, an organic body, an animal, or a state, are essentially co- 
operative systems, which endure only so long as an inner codp- 
eration endures and so long as codperation with the environment 
endures. | 

As the chemistry of codperating elements creates new chemical bod- 
ies, with new properties and new powers for world service, so the super- 
chemistry of codperating lives creates new organisms with their new 
powers for world service. These new properties of the “living body,” 
or of a group of men called a ‘‘team,” a college, a city, or a state, consti- 
tute what is called the ‘‘soul” or “spirit,” or attribute of that group. 
All these ‘“‘new things” are unlike any of their constituent parts, hence 
they can be measured, or compared, only in terms of themselves. 


Looking backward, says Patten, we see nothing but the futile 
conflict of chaos, a primordial simplicity, continuity, and uni- 
formity. Itis complete ‘freedom.’ Looking forward, progress 
consists in the serial creation away from a primordial vastness, 
minuteness, emptiness, toward a creative fullness and variety, 
such as is found in organization and unified codperative power. 
The creative drift is in the direction of a stable organic whole. 
Codperation is the key to the whole upward movement. As it 
progresses, the world becomes more disciplined.? 

This process of nature-growth is ‘‘ purposeful” in the same sense that 
the physiological acts of a plant, a worm, a frog, or a human being, or 
any of their parts or organs, may be purposeful or self-constructive acts; 
for nature-growth is the product of the codperative acts of many differ- 
ent things, the purpose of which, or if you prefer, the end, or result of 
which, is thecreation, preservation, and growthof nature’sindividuality.® 


1 William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution (R. G. Badger), p. 29. 
2 Loc. cit., pp. 42, 48, 44, 8 Loc. cit., 47. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 139 


If, now, some one objects that such a conception of the world 
movement comes into conflict with the law of conservation of en- 
ergy, Patten makes the very pertinent remark that organization 
and evolution are manifest facts, quite as manifest, to be sure, 
as the law of conservation itself. 

I have quoted at some length from this book not because 
of its finality, but as an example of the attempt, common 
among present-day biologists, to introduce into the theory of 
evolution a wholly new set of concepts. So accustomed are we 
to hear of mass and motion and action and reaction as ultimate 
ideas that it seems strange to us to hear of self-expression and 
self-sacrifice as concepts equally fundamental. 

All this seems to be very instructive and suggestive. It illus- 
trates what seems to be a prevalent tendency in biology now, a 
tendency to place less emphasis on matter, motion, and force, and 
more upon life itself and its concomitant creation of values. We 
have tried without much success to interpret heredity, variation, 
and the struggle for existence in terms of chemistry and physics, 
in terms of masses of matter in motion, in terms of that myste- 
rious something called ‘‘energy,” and to explain evolution as a 
process of natural selection of chance variations. Perhaps we 
should reverse this and explain variation in terms of evolution, 
and explain heredity and the struggle for existence in terms of 
self-expression and codperation. Perhaps, as Patten suggests, 
even growth, as in plants and animals, is a kind of “‘self-enlarge- 
ment,’”’ which is a fundamental property of matter. 

Instructive also is his belief that evolution means a progress in 
discipline rather than in freedom. ‘‘ Progressive union and sta- 
bility, progressive codperation, organization, service, and disci- 
pline are, therefore, inherent properties of life and matter.” 
Owing quite to incidental historical circumstances, we are now 
living in an age in which it has become customary to exalt free- 
dom to the skies. Thisis due to a passing social situation, the re- 
volt from a stage in social evolution in which authority had de- 
veloped intotyranny. The love of freedom has becomea kind of 
mania with us.!. Ina way, of course, evolution 7s in the direction 
of greater freedom. ‘True freedom arises through codperation, 


1 Fleutheromania, Irving Babbitt calls it. 


140 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the freedom to grow, to develop, to create. There is no conflict 
of ideals here; it is only that we have for inevitable reasons come 
to emphasize freedom too much and discipline too little. If, 
then, as Patten thinks, freedom belongs to the original chaos, 
while discipline and coéperation characterize all growth and or- 
ganization, the biological view seems here to strengthen the ethi- 
cal view. It may give a new direction to our freedom-intoxi- 
cated age to learn that discipline and coéperation are funda- 
mental in the evolutionary method. It may also give us new 
light as to the place of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest 
in social organization. 

After the triumph of Darwinism in the last century some Euro- 
pean statesmen justified the ruthless rivalry of nations by an ap- 
peal to the law of struggle for existence, and the law of the sur- 
vival of the fittest, as fundamental laws of nature. This was 
owing to their failure to recognize that the law of codperation is 
more fundamental than the law of competition; and it is just be- 
cause of this short-sightedness that we witnessed the threatened 
collapse of European civilization after the Great War. When 
we can introduce into political and international relationships 
some of that codperation which is shown in the body of a plant or 
an animal, or even in the structure of an atom, then we may hope 
for a social stability comparable with the stability which we find 
in nature. 

From another point of view Edwin Grant Conklin has devel- 
oped the same thought in his book, The Direction of Human Evo- 
lution. The evolution of the human body and brain is at an end, 
but not so social evolution, and the direction which it must take 
is that of increased group specialization and codperation. With- 
out this no further progress for the human race is possible. If 
democracy means a loose social organization and greater freedom 
of the individual, it is doomed. If it means specialization and 
codperation, it is the road to social welfare. 


Life and mind as achievements 
In conclusion, evolution seems to be a process of achievement, 
in which, step bystep, higher values are won. Life itself is one of 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 141 


these values; mind is one; science is one; social organization is 
one. Dare we go further and say with Hegel that philosophy, 
art, and religion are the final values toward which the world is 
striving, or shall we say that consciousness itself is the highest 
round of the ladder? 

I do not think we can answer these questions yet; but if it be 
true that evolution is a process of achievement, a great move- 
ment in the realization of values, then it becomes no longer a gos- 
pel of despair, as it has so often been, but a gospel of hope. 


A wholly different turn could be given to the evolutionary hypothesis 
if it was held that Lamarck, after all, was on the right track, and that, 
underlying natural selection and the struggle for life, there was a real 

‘tendency in organisms themselves to produce higher forms, meaning by 
higher those that gave more scope for intelligence, beauty, and love. 
The moral effort of man and the gradual flowering of culture out of 
savagery would then take their places as processes in harmony with the 
fundamental trend of things towards the better. 

This, the view of hope, is the one that has tended to prevail in our 
modern world. As such, it might almost be called the distinctive re- 
ligion of our time, all the more significant because it revives, possibly 
with the added weight given by modern science, that old belief in forma- 
tive impulses struggling up through chaos into ordered freedom, the be- 
lief that we saw dominated so much of Greek thought and influenced so 
profoundly the medizval mind.} 


But, as this author adds, if this be the religion of our times, it is 
one crossed by doubt. Will the philosophy and science of the 
twentieth century establish this article of our faith? 


In connection with this chapter read: 
James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism (The Macmillan Company), 
vol. 1, lectures 7, 9, and 10. 


Friedrich Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy (Henry Holt and Com- 
pany), pp. 180-206. 


Further references: 
Henry Sidgwick, Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations (The Macmillan 
Company), lectures 6 and 7. 


1 FF. Melian Stawell, in Stawell and Marvin’s The Making of the Western Mind, 
p. 313. (Reprinted by permission of George H. Doran Company, publishers.) 


142 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Geddes and Thomson, Evolution. (Home University Library, Henry 
Holt and Company.) 


J. Arthur Thomson, The System of Animate Nature (Henry Holt and 
Company), vol. 1, lectures xI-xvu. 


Richard S. Lull, Organic Evolution. (The Macmillan Company.) A 
standard text. 


Charles Darwin, Origin of Species. (D. Appleton and Company.) The 
Descent of Man. (D. Appleton and Company.) 


Vernon L. Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


John E. Boodin, A Realistic Universe (The Macmillan Company), chap. 
XVII; especially pp. 368 to 384. 


H. H. Lane, Evolution and Christian Faith. (Princeton University 
Press.) 


William Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution. (R. G. Badger.) 


Edwin Grant Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution. (Charles 
Scribner’s Sons.) 


C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


CHAPTER IX 
IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 


In this chapter we discuss a very old philosophical problem, that 
of ends or purposes. Is there purpose or design in nature? Does 
the world have a goal, or end, or purpose? Teleology is the name 
applied to the study of these questions. It is from two Greek 
words meaning the science or study of ends. 


Purpose in human affairs 

It is very evident that human beings work toward ends. The- 
oretically, whatever we do, we do for a purpose. You have a 
purpose in reading this book, perhaps to gain a knowledge of 
philosophy, perhaps to prepare for an examination. If youmake 
anything, it is made for a purpose; and each part of it has its own 
purpose. The motor car has a purpose. ' Every casting in it, 
every bolt, spring, pinion, rod, gasket, bushing, flange, or ball 
has its purpose. It is natural for us to think teleologically; that 
is, as if everything had a purpose, just as it has in human affairs. 
It is natural for us to think that every part of the human body 
has a purpose. Sight is the purpose for which the eye exists, and 
every minute part of the eye, muscle or lens or nerve cell, has its 
purpose. So of all parts of the body, muscles, bones, blood, 
glands, skin, hair, nails, eyebrows, and eyelashes — each has its 
purpose. The child seems instinctively to be a teleologist, for he 
is always asking the question — What is this for? He seems to 
take it for granted that everything in the world has a purpose, 
just as he assumes that everything which man makes has a 
purpose. 

But when the child grows up and begins to reflect, he sees that 
the subject presents difficulties. He sees clearly enough that hu- 
man beings, who can think and look forward and make plans, act 
purposively. But is it so certain that there is any purpose out- 
side the human mind? Science seems to teach that everything 


144 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


in nature acts not purposively, but mechanically. Whatever 
happens in nature, the falling of a stone, the erosion of a conti- 
nent, the formation of a snowflake, happens mechanically ; that is, 
its action is rigorously determined by preceding physical condi- 
tions. Every phenomenon in nature is fully accounted for by 
the sum total of physical conditions preceding it. A physicist, 
as soon as he stops to inquire what things are for, deserts his 
scientific standpoint; for the latter always presupposes that the 
complete explanation of things is found in the chain of physical 
sequences which conditions them. 

Take the automobile again. Its parts do not act purposively 
— they act blindly and mechanically, following definite mechan- 
ical laws. The horn honks, not to warn of the approach of the 
car, but because a current of electricity has been turned into a 
certain circuit and mechanically causes the vibration of a certain 
diaphragm. A wheel turns, not to propel the car, but because a 
certain amount of physical energy has been communicated to the 
axle; and if anything goes wrong with the mechanism no part of 
the car can adjust itself in an adaptive way to the new situation, 
but grinds itself out according to fixed mechanical law. So also 
of the tree or human body. ‘The sap in the tree is stirred to ac- 
tion, not to attain any end, but because of the mechanical influ- 
ence of the sunlight. The muscles of the body contract, not in 
order to deliver a blow, but because of the inflow of muscular and 
nervous energy. 

Pursuing this line of thought the reader may say: I think I see 
through the riddle. The parts of the motor car, of course, all act 
mechanically according to fixed physical laws; but it is still true 
that every wheel, valve, and washer has a function to perform, 
and this function may be regarded as a purpose, if we think of the 
whole machine as planned or designed by an inventor or a me- 
chanic. The purpose is outside the machine in the mind of the 
man who designed it. 


Apparent purpose in nature 
And now, he continues, let me think about the tree and the hu- 
man body. All the parts must act mechanically, and yet there 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 145 


seems to be a purpose in them, just as in the parts of the motor 
car. Certainly the purpose of the eye is to see, and of the thumb 
to grasp, and of the teeth to bite and chew; but since they are 
physical objects governed by physical laws, the purpose must re- 
side outside the body in some world-builder, or God. In other 
words, the tree and the human body must have been designed by 
some one having the mental power of vision to see an end to be 
accomplished, and then to adapt the instrument to the end; for 
it is quite clear — to take the case of the tree — that there is a 
plan or purpose in its parts — the leaves to serve as the lungs of 
the tree taking up the carbon dioxide from the air, the rootlets to 
absorb the moisture from the earth, the strong trunk to resist the 

winds, the rough bark to protect the vital parts beneath. Like- 
wise the warm fur of the musk ox and the sharp tooth of the tiger 
have their purpose. 

In other words, the various parts of the body or the tree or the 
flower or the blade of grass are instruments for accomplishing cer- 
tain ends, just as the parts of a motor car are instruments, each 
for a certain purpose; but, like the parts of the motor car, none 
of these instruments acts purposively. They blindly follow 
mechanical laws. 

All this sounds very reasonable, and it seems to imply that an- 
imal bodies and plants and trees are in some way the product of 
intelligence and design; and, since they are not the product of hu- 
man intelligence, they must be the work of a cosmic intelligence, 
or God. 


But it is just an analogy 

But, as we think about the matter more carefully, we begin to 
see that our reasoning was nothing but ananalogy. The parts of 
animal bodies and of plants have a striking resemblance to the 
parts of an automobile in this only, that they perform certain 
functions in such a way as to contribute to a final result, speed on 
the part of the motor car, and life or activity on the part of the 
animal. By analogy we infer that, since the motor car is the prod- 
uct of an outside intelligence, the plant and animal body must 
be also. What we really see in plant and animal bodies is a very 


146 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


wonderful adaptation. There is an adaptation between the parts 
of the tree and the environment, the latter consisting of sun and 
soil and air. There isan adaptation between the fur of the polar 
bear and the climate. 


Adaptation 

Now, just what 7s adaptation and what does it imply? Does 
it imply a mind which has thought of the adaptation and de- 
signed it; or is it nothing more than a relation of fitness or ad- 
justment to the conditions under which an organism lives? 
Does adaptation imply a purpose? Could it not have been at- 
tained by organisms through the method of trial and error? Has 
not Darwin explained it by the action of natural selection operat- 
ing on small chance variations? If so, is not our whole analogy 
between the motor car and the tree a fallacious one? Further- 
more, do we have in nature any such perfect adaptations as we 
have in human machines? Are there not countless cases of mal- 
adaptation, such as the city and the earthquake, or the migra- 
tory instincts of the birds and the late storms of spring which kill 
them by thousands? 

But, if we reject purpose as an explanation of adaptation, what 
is the alternative? Is chance the alternative? Are we, then, to 
suppose that all the world of beauty and order came fortuitously 
into being? Did the order which we see in the movements of the 
heavenly bodies just happen? Did it just happen that there is a 
moon. to light our way at night? Did the grateful alternation of 
sunshine and rain just happen? Did it just happen that the air 
is fit to breathe and that the Earth brings forth fruits and grains 
fit to serve as food? That this orderly world has come about 
by the chance collisions of atoms of matter is more difficult to be- 
lieve, as some one has said, than that Shakespeare’s plays should 
happen from an explosion in a printing office. 

What, then, are we to do? That the world has come about by 
chance seems impossible to believe; at any rate, we will not be- 
lieve it until we have exhausted all other hypotheses. On the 
other hand, that the world is a great machine, designed and cre- 
ated by some transcendent world-builder for some definite pur- 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 147 


pose, as the mechanic creates a motor car, seems like a childish 
analogy having little scientific value. 

But are there not other possibilities? Are chance and purpose 
the only alternatives? And if there are no other alternatives, 
might we say that the world is purposive without going so far as 
to think of it as a kind of manufactured article, planned and exe- 
cuted by some anthropomorphic god? Clearly the problem needs 
a lot of reflective thought. A glance at the history of the subject 
will first be helpful. 


Historical 

There was an old Greek philosopher named Anaxagoras, who 
discovered that the world is made out of a vast number of little 
atoms. Atoms, he thought, would serve as the material of the 
world, but what imparts to the atoms their original motion? An- 
axagoras needed a moving cause, and, therefore, affirmed that 
Mind was this moving cause. But we can hardly say that An- 
axagoras was a teleologist, for he considered mind to be merely 
an initial cause of the world, not a designing intelligence. 

Next came Socrates, who said that Anaxagoras did well to in- 
troduce mind as the cause of the world movement, but that he 
did not make enough use of this principle, for he, Socrates, saw 
evidences of benevolent intelligence and design in all the works 
of nature, instancing the beautiful adaptations seen in the hu- 
man body, such as the protection of the eyes by the bony ridge 
above them and by the eyelashes and eyebrows. Socrates, there- 
fore, is a representative of that view, already referred to, accord- 
ing to which the world is conceived somewhat after the manner 
of a machine, but a machine which is designed and planned by an 
outside intelligence. This view is sometimes called the carpen- 
ter theory of the Universe, or the watchmaker theory, giving us 
a static rather than a dynamic purposiveness. 

Plato was no less confident than Socrates, his teacher, that the 
world is purposive, but he held the theory in a less anthropo- 
morphic and mechanical form. The world, Plato believed, is 
through and through rational and orderly. It is a “‘cosmos,” 
notachaos. Its ultimate realities are Ideas, and these Ideas are 


148 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


values, and the world becomes real in proportion as crude “mat- 
ter’’ takes on these ideal forms. In Plato’s philosophy the eter- 
nal Ideas are types or patterns, of which individual things are 1m- 
perfect copies. The Good and the Beautiful are, for instance, 
eternal values which are to be copied. With Plato the world has 
a meaning and its meaning is to realize the perfection of the eter- 
nal Ideas. A philosophy which speaks of cosmic values, ideas, 
patterns, and types is thoroughly teleological. Surely, we have 
here in Plato, right at the beginning of the controversy, a won- 
derful conception of the Universe, which is quite different both 
from the crude theory of chance and the mechanical watchmaker 
theory of Socrates. Plato, to be sure, did not work out this part 
of his philosophy with great clearness or consistency, but it was 
certainly an epoch in the history of thought when it was first pro- 
posed that the world is a movement in the realization of values. 

Following Plato, Aristotle also held a world view thoroughly 
teleological. In some passages he speaks of design quite after 
the manner of Socrates. Everything in the world has what Aris- 
totle calls a “final cause,” or purpose. ‘The end for which a 
thing exists is a true cause of the existence of that thing, just as 
much as any efficient or mechanical cause. These ends Aristotle 
called final causes, a phrase which has become classical in the dis- 
cussion of the problem of purpose. We must not ever confuse fi- 
nal causes with first causes or with ordinary mechanical causes. 

As we get into the spirit of Aristotle’s philosophy, however, we 
discover that it is a kind of immanent dynamic purposiveness 
which he advocated. The world was never created, but is an 
eternal process or movement or development, in which the poten- 
tial is always passing on into the actual, and the actual is the 
ideal. We may say that animal species, human beings, states, in- 
stitutions, and justice are ideas which nature is realizing, or as 
we might almost say, which nature is striving to realize. 

But, Aristotle continues, what is the initial force or prime 
mover of the great world-development process? It must have 
some cause. Here Aristotle offers a suggestion very rich and 
provocative of our thinking, for he says that the Prime Mover, or 
God, moves the world by attracting it. The final ideal reality 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 149 


is good, hence desired. This daring conception of the Universe 
as a great process of realization drawn onward by the vision of 
an ideal end almost takes our breath away. Could it be true? 
Could it be reconciled with our modern evolutionary philosophy? 

Meanwhile, another great Greek thinker, Democritus, utterly 
denied the existence of any cosmic intelligence, plan, purpose, 
goal, or ideals. The Universe is a concourse of material atoms, 
themselves in eternal motion, whose mechanical configurations 
constitute all objects of experience. Epicurus and Lucretius, re- 
presenting the later Epicurean school, developed this anti-teleo- 
logical view, denying that nature has ends or purposes or any 
goal — denying also that ends or purposes do in any way act as 
causes determining the course of events. During the Middle 
Ages, it was the world view of Plato and Aristotle, rather than 
that of Democritus and the Epicureans, which found general ac- 
ceptance. The tendency increased, however, to go back to the 
form of statement held by Socrates. God designed and created 
the world. It was even thought that the Earth is the center of 
the Universe and was especially planned as a residence for man. 
This view finds its crowning exposition in Dante’s Divine Com- 
edy, where the whole Universe is a grand and mighty drama, ex- 
isting for man and his redemption. 

General purposiveness in nature was supported by Bruno, 
Newton, Leibniz, Voltaire, and later by Goethe, John Stuart 
Mill, and many others. In scientific circles, however, a teleo- 
logical view of nature was opposed from the time of Descartes. 
Plant and animal bodies and even the human body, as Descartes 
taught, were machines pure and simple. The introduction of 
final causes, said Francis Bacon, has done much to retard the 
progress of science, which is concerned only with physical causes. 
Spinoza and Hobbes likewise excluded all teleological notions 
from their philosophy. 

Parenthetically we may remark here — and this should throw 
light on the whole subject — that the conception of the world 
as a mere mechanical sequence of events, in which each step is 
determined and fully explained by the preceding ones, was a 
conception perfectly fitted to Francis Bacon’s purpose, which was 


150 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


not to understand the world, but to use it, to control it, to exploit 
it. ‘The world is “explained” by a knowledge of its mechanical 
sequences, if by explanation you mean that kind of understand- 
ing which enables us to make use of natural forces. One of the 
objects of the natural sciences is to gain acquaintance with the 
chain of sequences which are observed in nature and the uniform- 
ities which we see, in order that, desiring any particular kind of be- 
havior, we may know how to get it. Such knowledge is highly 
useful in the practical arts, in commerce, and in industry. Our 
tremendous success in controlling the forces of nature and in 
bending them to our material needs is due to Bacon’s method; 
but this kind of knowledge is not philosophy, nor, indeed, is it 
science in any true sense, nor does it satisfy the real searcher af- 
ter truth. Philosophy is an attempt to interpret the world, and 
no mere observation of sequences leads to such interpretation. 
Possibly the world has no end or purpose just in the human sense 
of the word purpose; but it undoubtedly has a plan, if by plan is 
meant a pattern, or a determinate order, rather than a design. 
Indeed, we may even say that it has a design, if by this word is 
meant not something designed, but something of which the unity 
and meaning can be discerned. 

Returning to the history of the controversy, although Des- 
cartes himself applied the mechanistic conception only to the ma- 
terially extended world, not including the free activity of thought 
or the purposes of God, yet it was easy after his time to extend 
the conception to the whole Universe, utterly denying any kind 
of cause except efficient or material causes. It seemed, however, 
a little difficult for the mechanists to account for adaptation in 
nature, especially in the organic world. Paley, a theologian of 
the eighteenth century, wrote a work whose purpose was to prove 
the existence of God by the evidences of intelligent design in the 
world; and he used the now well-known comparison of the watch 
and the human eye. The manifold parts of the watch and their 
adaptation to one another and to the purpose of keeping time 
are no more evidence of an intelligent designer than are the 
equally manifold and wonderful parts of the human eye, which 
was Clearly made for the purpose of sight. Instances of adapta- 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 151 


tion in nature, such as the wonders of the human body and the 
marvelous instincts of animals, may be heaped up till the reader 
is convinced that there is intelligent design in nature.’ It 
would seem to be impossible to account for such adaptations by 
chance, and it was assumed that conscious design was the only 
alternative, an argument that was rather ineffectively met by 
the opponents of teleology instancing the many cases of maladap- 
tation in the world, and of sin and death and suffering; for ob- 
viously it is of little use to heap up illustrations of misfits in na- 
ture, since in the long run the cases of such misfits are merely the 
exceptions which bring into sharp relief the cases of adaptation 
— otherwise no species of plants or animals would continue to 
exist. Paleontology reveals the existence in the remote past of 
species of ants, for instance, identical with living species to-day. 
They are adapted to their environment and successive gen- 
erations live and thrive and fulfill all their functions. A late 
storm in the spring kills some robins and bluebirds, but year af- 
ter year and century after century the robin and bluebird species 
live, feed, breed, and appear to be happy. They are fitted to 
their environment. 


Darwin’s contribution 

But while the citing of cases of maladaptation may not weaken 
the old argument for design, this argument was immensely weak- 
ened by the coming of the theory of evolution in the nineteenth 
century, and especially by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. 
These cast a wholly new light on the old puzzle of adaptation 
and greatly strengthened the position of the mechanists; for it 
was now thought possible to explain adaptation in the organic 
world otherwise than by either chance or design, namely, by 
gradual small variations and natural selection of the fittest. 
Even the human eye, or any other marvel of adaptation, or any 
of the wonderful animal instincts, could be explained in this 
way. Given only plenty of time, variation, heredity, and the 


1A collection of such instances and a modernized form of Paley’s argument 
may be found in a book by J. N. Shearman, entitled The Natural Theology of 
Evolution. 


152 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


struggle for existence, and a single group of cells on the sur- 
face of the body fortuitously sensitive to light might develop. 
into such a complicated organ as the eye, quite on mechanistic 
principles. 

Hereupon the old watchmaker theory of the Universe pro- 
pounded by Socrates, nourished by Dante, developed in a child- 
ish form by Paley, fell into complete disrepute. Science explains 
all things by simple mechanical causation, and it is unnecessary 
to call in any designing God, or even any mystic vitalforce. The 
latter part of the nineteenth century was a period in which the 
exaltation of material science was at its height, faith in its pro- 
nouncements being greatly strengthened by its marvelous appli- 
cations in all branches of the practical arts. 


Twentieth-century caution 

The twentieth century has made us more thoughtful and more 
cautious. The riddle of the Universe cannot be so easily solved, 
as we thought, by assuming nothing but mass particles in mo- 
tion, the secrets of whose motions are revealed by the laws of 
physics and chemistry. Many things have given us pause. The 
Great War itself shattered our calm confidence in human progress 
toward a kind of approaching scientific millennium; nor have the 
events subsequent to the war tended to restore this confidence. 
The fashionable scientific optimism of pre-war days has given 
place to doubt and hesitation. Our conquest of nature and our 
multiplied mechanical inventions have not contributed so much 
as we had hoped to human welfare. 

In all this revision of the nineteenth-century standpoint there 
has, of course, been no question of the value of the scientific 
standpoint as such; but the question has come up whether the 
view which science gives us of the world is the only true one. 
Science sees the world under the aspect of its uniform se- 
quences and habits of behavior; not under the aspect of its mean- 
ing, its unity, its idea, its purpose. ‘‘The story of science is a 
true story, but not the whole story’? — and perhaps not the 
most interesting part of the story. 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 153 


The biological point of view 

When we begin to study the simplest living organism, we find 
that there is something which eludes the mechanical scheme; and 
this is life. A full description of the physical and chemical pro- 
cesses in a living organism does not give a complete understand- 
ing of it; there is something else which can only be expressed by 
the introduction of teleological concepts. We are up on another 
level of reality and we need new categories to explain what hap- 
pens there. 

The cause-and-effect relation, so fundamental in the mechani- 
cal sciences, no longer furnishes the key to the world of living or- 
ganisms; a new relation appears, namely, that of means and end. 

It does not, of course, replace the relation of cause and effect; it 
supplements it. With the coming of life, something appears 
which we must designate as value. Life is a value, a goal, a good; 
and whatever contributes to it is an instrumental value; for 
instance, food, air, water, sex, exercise. 


In physics the data are taken as external to and independent of each 
other. That is of the essence of the procedure of the mathematical phys- 
icist. His symbols take no cognisance of behaviour as exhibited in life 
or purposive action. But when we are observing a living organism this 
is just what we must take account of. We cannot get at the meaning or 
the reality of our data if we take them as if existing in isolation from 
each other. It is characteristic of the phenomena with which we are 
here concerned that the details of form, movement, and chemical com- 
position which we distinguish in them are essentially and not acciden- 
tally connected with each other. ‘‘ We are accustomed to the fact that 
a limb, or even a bone, of a certain build is associated with a whole body 
of a certain build. We know also that if an animal is breathing we may 
expect to find its heart beating and all its other organs in a state of more 
or less evident activity. We associate together the details of structure 
and activity as those of a living animal; we think and speak of it as 
alive, and we regard its structure and activities as the expression or 
manifestation of its life. What I wish to maintain is that in so regard- 
ing a living organism we use an hypothesis which is for biology just as 
intelligible, just as elementary, just as true to the facts known, and just 
as good a scientific working hypothesis, as is the hypothesis of the inde- 
structibility of matter for physics and chemistry.” 4 


1 Viscount Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism and of Other Subjects (Yale 
University Press), pp. 208-09. The quotation is from Viscount Haldane’s 
brother, J. S. Haldane, The New Physiology (1919), p. 31. 


154 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


In the mechanistic age, when everything was supposed to be 
fully explained by its pre-conditions, it was thought that nothing 
was valuable in itself, but became valuable by being desired. 
This view is changing now as we have come to see that biology 
and psychology are independent sciences, in which the laws of 
physics and chemistry are transcended, though not contradicted. 
The behavior of living matter can be understood only by ascrib- 
ing to the organism a value in itself. Both life and individuality 
seem to be values in themselves. The organism is a structure or 
unity, in which the parts exist for the whole and the whole for the 
parts. 


When biological science speaks of conditions as ‘“‘beneficial” or 
“harmful” for the organism; when it calls some chemical substances 
“foods,”’ others “ waste-products”’; when it speaks of the “function” of 
an organ, or through the concept of “organization” interprets the parts 
in the light of the whole; when, in dealing with “growth,” “behavior,” 
“reproduction,” efc., it applies the concept of the maintenance or devel- 
opment of each characteristic type of living structure — its language is 
full of the kind of teleology which the term ‘‘value,” or, if it be preferred 
“objective value,” is here intended to cover. Wherever, broadly speak- 
ing, the facts challenge us to say, not merely that B is the effect of A, but 
that B is the reason why or that for the sake of which A exists or occurs, 
there we have the «mmanent purposiveness of living things. 

When we ask what character in natural objects, or in nature as a 
whole, exhibits this immanent purposiveness, this “design,’’ most 
clearly, the answer must surely be that it is organisation — not merely 
in the static sense of a systematic structure of differentiated parts, 
but in the dynamic sense of this structure at work and functioning 
as a whole, responding through its organs (which are very literally 
“instruments’’) to its environment, adapting that environment to it- 
self and itself to it. A purposive structure, in Kant’s famous phrase, is 
one in which parts and whole are reciprocally means and ends. The 
subordination of the parts to the whole lies precisely in that delicate 
mutual adjustment of the parts which, in respect of their functioning, 
we call regulative, and which in form as well as in function yields the char- 
acteristic individuality — one might almost say, using the word in the 
artistic sense, ‘‘the effect’? — of each living thing. Aristotle went 
straight to the heart of the matter when he compared this organisation 
of each living thing to the order of a commonwealth. ‘And the animal 
organism must be conceived after the similitude of a well-governed com- 
monwealth. When order is once established in it, there is no more need 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 155 


of a separate monarch to preside over each several task. The individ- 
uals each play their assigned part as it is ordered, and one thing follows 
another in its accustomed order. So in animals there is the same or- 
derliness — nature taking the place of custom and each part naturally 
doing its work as nature has composed them.” We have here clearly 
what in the language of modern biology is expressed as “‘the conception 
of the living thing as an autonomous unit in which every part is func- 
tionally related to every other and exists as the servant of the whole.” ! 


Non-mechanical concepts 

_ In the realm of organic life we need have no hesitation in using 
the word purposive. It is a concept as useful in the study of 
life and mind as is that of motion in physics. Try to understand 
a political institution, or a social organization, or a commercial 
enterprise, without the concept of purpose; then see whether 
you have any better success in understanding the functions 
and structures of the human body, of the bird’s wing, or the in- 
stincts of the ant or bee, without this concept. Even the sim- 
plest organism selects certain things for food and avoids other 
things because they do or do not serve its purpose. Also in the 
primary division of the cell there is a selective process, by which, 
when the chromosomes divide, a selection is made from the ma- 
terial in the cytoplasm suitable to its use. The rootlets of the 
plant select from the soil those elements which serve its purpose. 
There is purpose in the nest which the bird builds, namely, the 
hatching and rearing of the young. We can give a detailed ac- 
count of the mechanism of the bird’s movements, the physical 
forces involved, just as we can of the behavior of the men con- 
ducting a political campaign; but these movements and forces 
do not tell the whole story. Concepts such as matter, motion, 
cause, and effect are good and wholly pertinent — only they are 
not sufficient. No doubt the concepts purpose, means, end, 
value, do not tell the whole story either; but they are quite as 
necessary as the concepts of mechanics in coming to an under- 
standing of the facts of life. In organic bodies the part is for the 


1 Hoernlé, Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics (Harcourt, Brace and Com- 
pany), pp. 159, 160. The quotations are from Aristotle, De Part. An., 645a, 20, 
and Henderson, The Order of Nature, p. 21. 


156 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


sake of the whole and the integrity of the whole is a value; and this is 
all that is necessary to give us the teleological or purposive char- 
acter of nature. 


In the organism there is manifest a development from birth to death, 
a development, too, controlled in the interests of the species to which 
the individual belongs. The end governs in these respects also, just as 
it supersedes the relationship of externality. Here the end is no exter- 
nal force or event. It is simply the fundamental character of the phe- 
nomenon, a character which endures through succession and change and 
is present throughout their course, moulding the development to its 
own purpose. There is apparent discontinuity at moments, there is 
accident, there is the contingency inseparable from externality. But 
the tendency remains unfaltering.? 


Many of the new views of evolution, which have been men- 
tioned, imply the notion of an end or purpose. Orthogenesis, in 
whatever form it is held, is teleological. When we say that evo- 
lution has a direction, when it is spoken of as creative, as a struggle 
for freedom, as a process of realization, as having a drift, as strate- 
gical, as consisting essentially of coéperation or mutual service, as 
comparable to the work of an artist, as proceeding from the needs 
of the organism — then a teleological world view is implied. 
It is implied also by all such expressions as an inner directing 
principle, an evolutionary urge, a primordial direction and codrdi- 
nation of energies. Even the phrase struggle for existence implies 
the notion of an end. 


Purpose in inorganic nature 

Mention was made in a previous chapter of Henderson’s study 
of purposiveness in inorganic nature.? Such studies as this are 
interesting for the reason that, since natural selection has so long 
been relied upon to disprove purposiveness in the organic world, 
and since it can have no application to the inorganic world, the 
presence of purposiveness in the latter would be a real evidence of 
some fundamental purposiveness in nature generally. Hender- 


1 Viscount Haldane, The Reign of Relativity (Yale University Press), p. 324. 
2 Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, and The Order of Na« 
éure. Henderson is Professor of Biological Chemistry in Harvard University. 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 157 


son finds that before life appeared upon our planet there was a pe- 
culiar fitness of the environment for it, which appears to be in the 
nature of a preparation. We may not be justified in speaking 
of it as a preparation; but the fitness is apparent and needs an 
explanation. 

Among some of the remarkable illustrations of this fitness, he 
mentions the presence upon the cooling surface of the Earth of 
the necessary proportions of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, and 
the peculiar character of their compounds; the great quantities 
of water and carbonic acid; the nearly constant temperature of 
the ocean; the ample rainfall; the unique expansion of water at 
the freezing point, preventing our rivers and lakes from freezing 
_ solid in winter; the thermal qualities of water, together with its 
high specific heat moderating the summer and winter heat of the 
Earth; and the latent heat and solvent power of water. All 
these and many other peculiarities of the environment illustrate 
its unique and remarkable fitness for life. ‘‘Water, of its very 
nature, as it occurs automatically in the process of cosmic evolu- 
tion, is fit, with a fitness no less marvelous and varied than that 
fitness of the organism which has been won by the process of 
adaptation in the course of organic evolution.” 

These are only a few of the noteworthy instances in inorganic 
nature anticipatory, as it would seem, of life and its require- 
ments. What conclusions are we to draw from such a situation 
as this? Only one conclusion is possible, as Henderson believes. 
There is a hitherto unrecognized order in nature, whose exact 
laws we are as yet unable to fathom. It is almost infinitely im- 
probable that the unique totality of properties of the physical 
elements which provide the maximal fitness for organic life 
should be the result of accident. 


The connection between these properties of the elements, almost infi- 
nitely improbable as the result of contingency, can only be regarded, isin 
truth only fully intelligible even if mechanistically explained, as a pre- 
paration for the evolutionary process. By this I mean to say that it 
resembles adaptation.... 

Hence we are obliged to regard this collection of properties as in some 
intelligible sense a preparation for the processes of planetary evolution. 


158 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


... Therefore the properties of the elements must for the present be re- 
garded as possessing a teleological character.! 


Mechanism rules throughout the world, but does not rule 
supreme. There is an organization and order independent of 
mechanism. Not only is life itself something transcending 
mechanism, but the tendency toward life is also something 
transcending it. 

But now, how are we to interpret this tendency, this teleo- 
logical character of the inorganic world? Shall we say that it 
indicates a purpose, or design? Henderson does not take this 
further step. His aim is not to interpret in any human terms the 
order which he finds in nature, but rather to limit himself to the 
necessary implications of the actual facts which science discerns. 
He does, however, go so far as to compare the primeval tendency 
which is discovered through the whole process of evolution to the 
work of an architect who designs a house. 

But perhaps the most interesting of his conclusions is that the 
Universe is ‘‘biocentric.”’ Since, now, there was a time when no 
life existed on the Earth, this statement can mean nothing else 
than that the world in its inorganic stage looks forward to the 
coming of life, is adjusted to it, is in some sense a preparation for 
it. Atany rate, ‘‘the properties of matter and the course of cos- 
mic evolution are now seen to be intimately related to the struc- 
ture of the living being and to its activities.” ? 


The interpretation 

If, then, nature even in its inorganic stage shows evidence of 
order, structure organization, harmonious unity; if in the realm 
of living organisms, it shows values, ends, and purposes; if evolu- 
tion is selective, showing direction and coéperation, how finally is 
all this to be interpreted? Is the world purposive in the sense of 
being purposed? Has it a design in the sense of being designed? 
If so, we must introduce the notion of mind, and think of the 


1 The Order of Nature (Harvard University Press), pp. 190, 192. Compare 
also The Fitness of the Environment, chaps. vil and VIII. 
2 The Fitness of the Environment, p. 312. 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 159 


world movement as something planned or designed by a mind 
which can imagine in advance an end or purpose, and in some 
way will it, or create it, or cause it to come into being. The 
world would exist, then, first as idea, and our tendency would be 
to think of the idea as a kind of efficient cause, or at least as one 
of the conditions or antecedents of the coming of the world into 
being. | 

If we introduce mind as a world cause, it would not, of course, 
be necessary to think of it in a crudely anthropomorphic form, as 
if a world-builder, working upon plastic or resistant material, 
planned, contrived, designed, or manufactured the world after 
the manner of the old watchmaker theory. We should think of 
the world as the expression or manifestation of an infinite or ab- 
solute mind or self; or we should think of mind as immanent in 
the world, an indwelling spirit or intelligence working through 
evolution and the laws of nature in a spiritually ordered world. 
Practically all our modern idealistic, personalistic, theistic, or 
pan-psychic systems of philosophy have this great thought in 
common: The world is essentially rational purposive, and teleo- 
logical, being the manifestation or expression of an infinite, abso- 
lute, or indwelling mind, consciousness, self, spirit, or God. So 
taught Fichte, Hegel, Fechner, Lotze, Wundt, Paulsen, Bradley, 
Royce, Bowne; and so are teaching at the present time many 
of our leading American, French, German, and Italian philoso- 
phers. It is not necessary to suppose that the indwelling cosmic 
mind, the world soul, the divine presence, must work just as our 
minds do, if we are to call its action purposive. As Bosanquet 
has pointed out, we may still speak of an action as purposive 
without considering the ‘‘end”’ as the completion of a serial 
process in which means and end have a temporal relation. Con- 
sider, for instance, any organic product, say a flower. 


It is ridiculous to say that such a product arises by accident; that is, 
as a by-product of the interaction of elements in whose nature and gen- 
eral laws of combination no such result is immanent, as though we were 
dealing with the insight of a human contriver, by which the more com- 
plex developments and combinations were not anticipated. ... On the 
other hand, we must not say that ‘‘ purpose is operative” in the flower or 


160 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY | 


the wave, if that is to mean that we ascribe them to an end or idea, 
somehow superinduced upon the course of their elements by a power 
comparable to finite consciousness, operating as it were ab extra, and 
out of a detached spontaneity of its own. If the former notion spelt 
accident, this spells miracle.} 


The evidence is pretty strong, as we have seen, that the world 
ts purposive in the sense of exhibiting order, pattern, ‘‘design,” 
organization, structure, value, ends; and certainly the most nat- 
ural, if not the most logical, explanation of this fact is the pres- 
ence of mind immanent in the world. That the action of the 
‘divine mind”’ is ideational, volitional, actuated by desire, like 
the finite human mind, is not necessarily implied in a purposive 
world. It is not even implied that such a mind is conscious, if 
by consciousness we mean that awareness and togetherness of 
thought which characterizes finite minds. The question of the 
attributes of creative mind is not, however, before us now; the 
only problem that concerns us here is whether any better hypoth- 
esis is possible to explain the evident purposiveness of the world 
than the presence of mind either external to and transcending na- 
ture or immanent and indwelling in nature. It is significant, in- 
deed, that so careful a scholar and scientist as L. T. Hobhouse 
says that his later investigations have led him to believe that 
something of the nature of mind is to be carried further down in 
the organic world than he has previously believed; and even to 
raise the question whether mind may not be the essential driving 
force in all evolutionary change.? 


The new teleology 

Is there, however, any other possible way of explaining teleo- 
logy than by the assumption of a mind in nature realizing ends 
through a process of envisagement? No doubt the reader will 
say there simply is no alternative. Jf there is purpose in the 
world, there must be mind antecedent to the end. But let us see 
whether this is necessarily true. Possibly it is nothing but an in- 


1 Bernard Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (copyrighted 
by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission), pp. 147, 148, 149. 
2.1L. T. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution, 2d ed., p. ix. Compare above, p. 101. 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 161 


veterate habit that leads us to think always of efficient causality 
and no other kind, a habit much encouraged by our modern de- 
votion to the physical sciences. Why must we always think that 
a thing is to be explained by what goes before? Why may it not 
be explained by the end for which it is indispensable? Ever 
since Kant in his striking Critique of Judgment taught us that 
an organism is something in which whole and part are recipro- 
cally determined, philosophers have been puzzling over this 
strange problem and wondering whether we have a new kind of 
teleology here. In these concluding paragraphs let us consider 
this new way of regarding purposiveness in nature, and if the 
view seems strange and hard to understand, let us consider it 
merely as an interesting path of promise to be neither hastily 
rejected nor accepted. Here I wish to quote from Windelband, 
who has formulated this new teleology very clearly: 


In the provinces of physics and chemistry we naturally express our- 
selves in mechanical terms: in the province of biology in teleological lan- 
guage. When oxygen and hydrogen combine in the proportion 1:2, we 
get water; but we may just as well say, if there is to be water, oxygen 
and hydrogen must, etc. On the other hand, we say that if an organism 
is to have differentiated sensations of light, it must have a peripheral 
structure like the eye; and in this case a converse mechanistic expression 
would not suit our purpose, at least unless we express the invertibility of 
the causal relation by adding the word “only.” Thus we may say: Only 
at a moderate temperature are organisms produced, and therefore, if or- 
ganisms are to be produced, a moderate temperature is needed. This 
form of expression is most frequently found in connection with the com- 
plex isolated events of history. Only where we have a spiritual atmo- 
sphere like that of Germany in the eighteenth century and a genius like 
Goethe is a Faust possible; in order to have a Faust we need, etc. 

When we inquire into the correctness of these expressions, we must 
first make their meaning quite clear. Let us take the classical illustra- 
tion of the organism. Its vital activity and its development are made 
possible only by these definite organs and their no less definite functions. 
But these definite organs and functions are, in turn, only possible in this 
organism. Hence the whole, which causes the effect, determines the 
parts which are required for it. They are only in it; and it is possible 
only through them. In this reciprocal dependence of the whole and the 
parts Kant has given us the classic definition of an organism. A watch 
is a whole that may be put together out of preéxisting wheels, ete. But 


162 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the organism must itself produce the parts of which it is to consist. 
From this we get two fundamental types of the construction of a whole: 
the mechanical and the organic. In the one the parts precede the whole 
and produce it by being put together. In the organic whole, on the 
other hand, the parts themselves are conditioned by the whole and are 
only possible in it. In the organic whole, therefore, the end, which is 
to come out of it, determines the beginning. 

This latter formulation is at first sight too much for ordinary views of 
causation. The determination of the beginning by the end seems para- 
doxical and impossible. That the preéxisting should determine the 
present seems natural enough, though it is not quite so self-evident as it 
seems at first sight; but how can the future, which does not yet exist, do 
anything? How can it itself determine the process of an event to which 
alone it will owe its existence? It seems to be, not merely incomprehen- 
sible, but impossible. We may, however, at once weaken the force of 
these objections by a few general considerations. In the first place, it 
has already been shown that causal determination by something preéx- 
isting is, though a very common idea, yet one that proves logically in- 
comprehensible when it is closely studied. ‘Then there is another thing. 
If we, for instance, regard the time-relation as phenomenal, we see that 
preéxistence or post-existence is merely a thought-form of our restricted 
intellect, which ought not to make so much of the paradox of teleologi- 
cal dependence; the less so, as this way of looking at things is found to be 
impossible for certain groups in the phenomenal world. Both Aristotle 
and Schelling laid stress on this principle of indispensability, and Fichte, 
when he so clearly grasped that what ought to be is the reason of all be- 
ing, pointed out the source of the prejudice against teleology: it is based 
upon the concept of substance and the assumption, connected there- 
with, that something must exist if anything is to come into being. The 
opposite conception, which regards original action as directed toward its 
achievement and therefore determined by it, is the true, genuine, and 
pure teleology of the organic view of the world.! 


This ‘‘true” or “genuine teleology”? must not be confused 
with the other teleology of the designing mind. In this latter we 
still adhere dutifully to the old causal relationship; only we put 
the zdea of the end into the series as an efficient cause. It is not, 
we say, the coming reunion with my friends at the Christmas 
fireside that causes me to get the money from the bank and buy 
my ticket for the train, but the idea of the reunion. Certainly 


1 Wilhelm Windelband, An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Joseph 
McCabe (Henry Holt and Company), pp. 144, 145, 146. 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 163 


this is one way of looking at it, this analysis of the elements of 


the situation into the temporal relation of cause and effect, a 


way of looking at it highly useful in the physical sciences and 
the practical arts. 

But is there not another way of regarding the whole question, 
pointing to a deeper understanding of the course of nature? Let 
us make the daring experiment of thinking that the end actually 
determines the means. This certainly seems to be the case in 
the organic world. It seems as if the parts of the eye come into 
existence in the process of evolution, not because of some mate- 
rial motions among atoms and molecules, but because they are 
indispensable to the act of seeing. No doubt, as Professor Win- 
delband says, this way of regarding nature is difficult for most 
of us, wedded as we are to the mechanical cause-and-effect way 
of thinking; but once*grasped, this truer teleology may prove to 
be a kind of revelation. 

From this new point of view, form and structure are the reali- 
ties of the world; matter their mere potency. The world is a pro- 
cess of realization, an achievement. We have called it a kind of 
creative evolution. Such it is when viewed from any given stage 
in the evolutionary process; but now we see that its creations are 
the realization of patterns possessing final value in themselves. 
This was nearly the view of Aristotle and it is closely related to 
that of Plato. The world movement is a developmental process, 
in which matter is taking on form or structure. It is the form 
and structure, not matter, which are real. Form and structure 
are ideal realities — that is, values; and they are final causes. 
Plant and animal species are then final causes; life itself is a final 
cause; the human species, the mind of man, are final causes. 
Viewed all along the evolutionary line there is creative synthesis 
issuing In novelties and new and higher values; but the reason 
why the things which we have been accustomed to call efficient 
causes appear is because they are indispensable to the new reali- 
ties. We may say that Nature is striving toward certain goals 
— life, individuality, mind, consciousness, social organization, 
freedom, morality — all of which are values or ends; we may say 
that it is all a struggle for existence, since these values are the 


164 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


realities of the Universe, the real existences. Such a view, of 
course, is wholly teleological — only now we are not thinking of 
Nature or mind as envisaging these values, and then by a series 
of volitions bringing them into existence; we are thinking rather 
of these final values as wholes, of which the other things are 
parts; and we are thinking that the parts exist for and are de- 
termined by the whole.! Mind, therefore, does not plan the 
world, does not image it, nor will it; and yet mind is the cause 
of awe world, its final cause; for mind is one of the goals or ends 
toward piel nature is tending. 

Such a conception of the Universe as this is rather startling in 
our modern scientific age. It was common enough among the 
ancients. It reminds us vividly of Plato; but there are many 
signs of a returning Platonism. Says Paul Elmer More: 


In a general way it may be said that, with natural classes, such as men 
and animals, the difficulties of the nominalistic view are seemingly the 
more insuperable, and that, in the slow return of science and philosophy 
to a dependence on some sort of teleology in the process of evolution, we 
are forcing ourselves back into a belief in Ideas in something like the 
Platonic sense. 

The apex of our esthetic experience which was attained by the as- 
cending steps of generalization is now conversely regarded as a creative 
energy reaching down into the world and imposing upon its fleeting sub- 
stance the forms and order of stability. And this Cause of being, as 
contrasted with the not-being of chaos, will become to Plato, particu- 
larly in his later years, when in the Timeus and the Laws he turns from 
the vexations of metaphysical inquiry back to the less inquisitive faith of 
youth, simply God.? 


To put all this very bluntly, is it Push, or Pull, that drives or 
draws the world onward? It is the vis a tergo, the push from be- 
hind, that our habitual nineteenth-century mechanistic habit of 
thought has always emphasized. And yet in humility we realize 
that even the manner of this push, to say nothing of its reason, 
isunknown. So perhaps after all the world is pulled, not pushed. 
Weare able from our own experience to get a glimpse, at least, of 


1 Compare the profound treatment of this subject in Bernard Bosanquet’s The 
Principle of Individuality and Value, chaps. Iv, v. 
2 Platonism (Princeton University Press), pp. 169, 201. 


IS THE WORLD PURPOSIVE? 165 


the manner of an attractive force. We know how we are drawn 
toward beauty and worth. Plato in his doctrine of love has 
elevated this into a world power. Royce called it the ‘‘homing 
instinct of the soul.”’ Aristotle made a final suggestion that the 
great Prime Mover, God, moves the world by the power of at- 
traction — as a picture draws us to it. 


Peer as deeply and as fixedly as you will into the abysses of your own 
being; you shall always find therein that it is all and only the Future 
that determines and in a way creates the Present. At every instant the 
Past crumbles into nothingness under our feet and we flee from it as 
from a levee sinking into the Mississippi, while the eternal Future, like 
the eternal Feminine, draws us upward and on. Not merely, mark you, 
the immediate Future; in higher and higher consciousness, yea, even in 
subconscious depths, the voice cries out from the wilderness of the far- 
beyond; the endless stretches of the ages-to-come catch up the call and 
plead with impassioned eloquence; the broad opening vistas of time-to- 
be resound with the hopes and fears, the aspirations and aversions, of 
the race of man, of the heart of existence itself, and these, yea, these 
alone it is that guide the bird of history through all her far-homing 
flight. 

We may say, then, that it is To-morrow and not Yesterday that 
makes To-day what itis. In itself it is no more and no less plausible 
that the Future than that the Past should determine the Present; but 
the undeniable fact is that the determinant is the Future and not the 
Past.} 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Friedrich Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy. ‘Translated by Thilly 
(Henry Holt and Company), pp. 145-80. 


John E. Boodin, A Realistic Universe (The Macmillan Company), chap. 
XVUI. 


Further references: 
James Ward, The Realm of Ends. (G. P. Putnam’s Sons.) 


L. T. Hobhouse, Development and Purpose. (The Macmillan Company.) 
J. 8. Haldane, Mechanism, Life, and Personality. (John Murray.) 


Jacques Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life (University of Chicago 
Press), chap. I. 


1 William Benjamin Smith, ‘‘Push? or Pull?”? The Monist (Open Court Pub- 
lishing Company), vol. 23, p. 33. 


166 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Bernard Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (The Mac- 
millan Company), lecture tv. 

Roy Wood Sellars, Hvoluttonary Naturalism (The Open Court Publishing 
Company), chap. xv. 

Joseph Alexander Leighton, Man and the Cosmos (D. Appleton and Com- 
pany), pp. 272-76. 

A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy 
(Oxford University Press), lecture xvu. 

R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics (Harcourt, 
Brace and Company), chaps. vi, vil. 

Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (The Macmillan 
Company) and The Order of Nature (Harvard University Press). 

Howard C. Warren, “A Study of Purpose,” Journ. of Phil., Psy., and 
Sct. Meth., vol. 13, 1916. Three articles, pp. 5, 29, 57. 

William Benjamin Smith, “Push? or Pull?” The Monist, vol. 23, pp. 16-41. 

Francis B. Sumner, “ Adaptation and the Problem of Organic Purposeful- 
ness,” American Naturalist, 1919. 


J. Arthur Thomson, The System of Animate Nature (Henry Holt and 
Company), vol. 1, lecture x. 


CHAPTER X 
THE PROBLEM OF GOD 


Our widening view 

No doubt every writer upon the God problem approaches the 
subject with difiidence and hesitation. What is true of all phil- 
osophical problems is particularly true of this. There is a de- 
mand of the human mind to penetrate to the very outer regions 
of truth, but the task becomes more and more difficult as we 
approach these farther regions. Dogmatism is out of place here 
and faith is necessary; not faith, perhaps, in any generally ac- 
cepted view, but faith in the real progress of science and philoso- 
phy toward the solution of the problem. There is always hope 
so long as we can feel that we are actually widening our view and 
increasing our knowledge about God. Certainly wonderful 
progress has been made in recent years in science, philosophy, 
and religion in coming to a better understanding of this subject. 

There has been a slow and gradual evolution of the idea of God 
from the very crudest notions of primitive man to the larger and 
truer conceptions of the present. One thing which makes this 
subject very difficult for us is that somewhat the same evo- 
lution of the God idea takes place in the mind of the individual 
that has taken place in the history of mankind. As we outgrow 
our childish notions, a period of readjustment is necessary which 
is often the occasion of perplexity and even of skepticism. Not- 
withstanding all these difficulties, there are certain things to be 
said in this chapter which should bring to the student of philoso- 
phy some assurance and comfort. We recall Francis Bacon’s 
saying that it is a little philosophy which leads to atheism. 


Methods of approach 

_ There are several methods of approach to the God problem, 
many of them quite beyond the compass of an introductory 
book on philosophy. The subject may be approached from the 


168 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


standpoint of one’s own individual religious experience. It may 
be approached from the standpoint of religious faith in the teach- 
ings of the church or religious authority. It may be approached 
from the standpoint of profound philosophical reflection. 

In a short introductory chapter such as this the God problem 
cannot be studied in any of these ambitious ways; but it may be 
stated, the terms may be defined, and some of the older and some 
of the more recent views may be given. Oftentimes we are more 
interested to know what the great men of the world, the philoso- 
phers and the poets and the scientists, have thought and said 
about God than we are in tracing through a subtle argument to 
prove or disprove his existence. And we are all anxious to know 
whether the methods and results of science, in which we have 
such unbounded trust, have any bearing on the subject, and if so 
what this bearingis. Perhaps the most important thing of all is 


to find out just what we mean, or ought to mean, by the word — 


God. 

Authority has been so much abused in the history of religion 
that we have come to rebel against this method of instruction; 
yet after all for most of us authority counts more than argument, 


especially if it is the authority of our own particular saints, be — 
they religious teachers, philosophers, poets, scientists, or men of | 


affairs. For instance, it is to many interesting and perhaps con- 
vincing to know that Lord Arthur J. Balfour, formerly English 


Premier and more recently head of the English delegation to the © 
Disarmament Conference at Washington, among his other phil- — 
osophical works has written a book called Thetsm and Human- — 
asm in which he bases the necessity for God upon three spheres 


of human thought and action, namely, ethics, sesthetics, and the 


principles of knowledge. Others find their faith in God strength- — 
ened when they recall that Browning, in his earliest long poem ~ 
written at the age of twenty-one, exclaimed, “‘Sun-treader, I be- — 
lieve in God and truth and love,” and that then, after a long life — 


rich in human experience, he wrote in his ‘‘ Francis Furini’’: 


Though Master keep aloof, 
Signs of his presence multiply from roof 
To basement of the building! 


< 


THE PROBLEM OF GOD 169 


Others, again, like to trace the God idea through the history of 
races from the earliest primitive tribes to our present civilized 
peoples, or to follow it in the history of philosophy from Plato 
and Aristotle to Josiah Royce or William James. This insurgence 
of the God idea in almost every philosophy, ancient or modern, 
and this saturation, so to speak, of popular as well as religious 
thought with God stimulate our interest and curiosity in this 
problem. We long to have it made clearer, and to learn of the 
attitude toward it of our modern scientific and philosophical 
thinkers. 


Definition of terms 
_ The prominence of the idea of God in the history of thought is 
shown by the richness of the vocabulary. We should become 
acquainted with the exact meaning of some of the most impor- 
tant terms. Theism, from the Greek word for God, is the term 
applied to the common belief in God as a personal, spiritual being 
with whom it is possible to come into intimate relations. Deism, 
from the Latin deus, is a term applied to the beliefs of a school of 
eighteenth-century thinkers who accepted the existence of God 
as creator and lawgiver, but who distrusted the personal relation- 
ship and who denied the possibility of miracles. Pantheism, 
from two Greek words meaning all and God, is the doctrine that 
God is all and all is God; God is identical with Nature or with the 
world. Polytheism means any system of religion or doctrine that 
recognizes a number of gods or many gods; Monotheism is a sys- 
tem that insists that there is only one God. Atheism is the name 
applied to a consistent attempt to deny or disprove the existence 
of God. Atheism in modern thought has largely given place to 
the more modest doctrine of agnosticism. Agnosticism teaches 
that human knowledge by its very nature is limited, and at- 
tempts to describe the kind of limitation it finds characteristic 
of our knowledge. In any case it finds knowledge of ultimate 
reality impossible, and therefore, of course, knowledge of God 
impossible. 
Philosophy, however, although it may not be able to penetrate 
very far into the mystery of God, must not shrink from the at- 


170 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


tempt. It can at least investigate the meaning of God in human 
experience, and it'can ask whether the belief in such a being is 
consistent with the science and philosophy of the present day, 
and whether it answers to any actual need in our experience. 

In former times there were three famous arguments for the 
existence of God — the cosmological, the ontological, and the 
teleological arguments, seeking to prove to unbelievers that God 
exists because the world exists, and must have a cause; because 
the idea of God exists, and must have a ground; and because of 
evidence everywhere in nature of his benevolent design. These 
have ceased to interest us. Kant, believer in God, showed the 
weakness of these proofs. Philosophy now limits itself to the 
more gracious task of determining the meaning of the God idea, 
and inquiring whether in the outer world of science or the inner 
world of experience there is anything which calls for or answers 
to this meaning. 


God in human experience 

What, then, does the word God mean to us. At the very first, 
when we begin to reflect carefully about this subject, we see that 
we must distinguish between the way we image or visualize God, 
or think about him in our everyday thought, and the meaning 
which we attach to the word, when we reflect seriously about 
him. Influenced by paintings which we have seen in childhood, 
or by the vivid imagery of Milton’s Paradise Lost, we think of 
God in human form, magnified, perhaps, and glorified, but having 
human attributes both of body and mind. Anthropomorphismis 
the technical term which describes this common tendency to give 
to God the form of man. Xenophanes, an early Greek philoso- 
pher-poet, bitterly complained that human beings think of the 
gods in human form. Modern critics have also ridiculed the an- 


thropomorphic habit, not, perhaps, always realizing that those — 


who practice it do not take it too seriously; for when asked, 
first, what they mean by the word God, and, second, how they 
think of him, the results in the two cases are found to be quite 
different. ‘The criticism also has been made that in referring to 
God we use the pronouns He and Him, with the implication that 


THE PROBLEM OF GOD 171 


God is masculine. Evidently this, too, should not be taken too 
seriously. We have no pronoun which can be applied to a person 
who is neither masculine nor feminine, and he and him are of 
course used generically in this case. The Christian Scientists 
speak graciously of the Father-Mother God. : 
_ What most people mean when they use the word God is a super- 
natural being, spoken of as a Spirit, who is righteous and su- 
premely powerful, who has a certain control over our destiny, 
and with whom we may come into friendly relations, if our own 
character and attitude are right. They regard him, perhaps, 
also as the creator of the world, and as moral lawgiver and judge, 
and believe that he is everywhere present in the world as an 
indwelling presence. 

An analysis of this or any current conception shows that the 
God idea, resolves itself into the idealization of certain funda- 
mental and characteristic values which have ranked high in hu- 
man experience, particularly power, righteousness, love, justice, 
and personality. These are the things which appeal to us as of 
supreme worth, and God is the embodiment or personification of 
these ideals. In our own lives, which have from the beginning 
been social, we have experienced the joy of power when we our- 
selves exercise it, and the fear of it when exercised by others. As 
for righteousness, it has been the very condition of all social life; 
only by its practice can men live together in social groups. Love 
is equally fundamental in human intercourse, not only in the 
family, but in the form of codperation in the community; while 
justice, which is the adequate adjustment of rewards and punish- 
ments to conduct, answers to a deep inner demand of the heart. 

But we live not only in a social world; we live in the presence of 
objective nature. We are its product, its children, perhaps its 
puppets. God, then, is that mysterious and unknown Power, 
fearful yet friendly, which manifests itself in the productive 
power of nature, in life and death, in the raging storm, in the 
vast ocean, in the deadly flash of lightning, in the beneficent life- 
giving sunshine, in the timely rain. God is fearful, yet friendly. 
He made the world and made us. He demands righteousness 
and justice; yet ultimately he has a kindly attitude toward man, 


172 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


responding to his prayers. It is no doubt due to our efforts to 
give expression to these ideal excellences that it has been cus- 
tomary to give God such attributes as Absolute, Eternal, Infi- 
nite, Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent. These terms, 
formerly much used, may be regarded as so many superlatives by 
means of which we attribute to God power, knowledge, and pres- 
ence very great. In our present-day dynamic vitalistic manner of 
thinking we prefer to think of God as a vital energy, an upbuild- 
ing, creative, integrating power. 

But while these two ideas of God, as the personification of 
all ideal excellences and the embodiment of natural forces, have 
predominated in religious thought, they do not quite express the 
whole meaning. God, to many, perhaps to finer souls like that 
of Emerson, is the Over-Soul, ‘‘the wise silence, the universal 
beauty, the Eternal One,” while to Wordsworth he is ‘‘a pres- 
ence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense 
sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling 
is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living 
air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; a motion and a 
spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
and rolls through all things.”” Wordsworth, therefore, needs no 
proofs of God, for he is felt, and felt as a presence, a presence 
disturbing, yet disturbing with the joy of elevated thoughts. 

The Mystics of all ages, whose intuitions and inner perceptions 
point rather to a real form of human experience than to any path- 
ological states of mind, have in a similar way felt and experienced, 
God rather than thought or reasoned about him, and felt him 
as life or love or infinitude. 


William James and the divine MORE 
Thus far, then, in this chapter we have learned nothing defi- 


nite at all as to whether God exists or not. We have merely no- © 


ticed something of the importance of the problem in the history 
of human thought, and we have seen in general what the mean- 
ing of the God idea is to common people, to the poet and to the 
mystic. Let us now try to learn something of the attitude of sci- 
ence toward the subject and the attitude of philosophers of the 





THE PROBLEM OF GOD 173 


present day. James’s method of approach to the problem may 
be our first concern. It is in the concluding chapter of his re- 
markable book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and in his 
essays, “Is Life Worth Living” and ‘Reflex Action and The- 
ism,” the last two found in his book, The Will to Believe, that 
‘ James gives us his most significant thoughts about God and 
ultimate spiritual reality. 

James does not proceed by the old method of displaying 
_ grounds for one’s belief. Rather he reminds each of us of our 
own experience of God. Dr. Cabot in his book, What Men Live 
By, says the four things we live by are work and play and love 
and worship. So James shows us by the pragmatic method that 
God is what we live by. In many of our experiences, we seem 
to touch another dimension of existence than the sensible and 
merely “‘understandable” world. Call it the mystical or the su- 
pernatural or the unseen world, as we may, or merely some kind 
of extension of our subconscious mind, nevertheless we feel a real 
connection with it, we get real power from it, and in it find the 
source of our idealimpulses. ‘This strong feeling, or even convic- 
tion, which so many of us have that this natural world, this 
world of wind and water, is not the whole of reality; but that it is, 
so to speak, soaking in or is bathed in another order or another 
kind of reality to which we may give the name spiritual or ideal, 
seems, so James thinks, to be pragmatically verified by its results. 


The notion that this physical world of wind and water, where the sun 
rises and the moon sets, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed- 
at and established thing, is one which we find only in very early reli- 
gions, such as that of the most primitive Jews. It is this natural reli- 
gion (primitive still, in spite of the fact that poets and men of science 
whose good-will exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new edi- 
tions tuned to our contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suf- 
fered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among 
whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every 
day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as 
science knows it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual 
intent. It is mere weather, as Chauncey Wright called it, doing and 
undoing without end. 


Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain — that the world of 


174 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


our present natural knowledge 7s enveloped in a larger world of some sort 
of whose residual properties we at present can form no positive idea. 


That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging 
multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove; 
and that our whole physical life may le soaking in a spiritual atmo- 
sphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for ap- 
prehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our 
domestic animals. 


Call it, if you please, just ‘“‘a stream of ideal tendency,” but 
unless there is such a stream it is difficult to account for the 
sources of all those ideals which make life worth living. That we 
live by these ideals is strictly true. In our experiences we distin- 
guish a lower and a higher part of ourselves and we feel that this 
higher part is In some way continuous with MORE of the same 
quality. This divine MORE is exterior to us, and yet we are in 
some way connected with it, in some kind of harmony with it, 
and upon this harmony our peace and security rest. ‘‘ The visi- 
ble world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws 
its chief significance,” and to the spiritual world we give the 
name God. 

If, now, it be replied that all this is mystical and points only to 
subjective and abnormal experiences of individuals and will not 
stand the test of science, James proposes this remarkable test: 
‘So long as we deal with the cosmic and general, we deal only 
with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private 
and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the 
completest sense of the terms.” If this strikes any of us as re- 
versing the true order, we must remember that the concepts 
which science uses and which seem so real to us — such, for in- 
stance, as matter, energy, ether, atom — are only symbols of 
reality which are useful in explaining the facts of experience. 


God in the science and philosophy of the present 
Now, this picture which James gives us of a world of spiritual 
reality beneath or beyond this physical order, a world which, in- 


1 William James, The Will to Believe (Longmans, Green and Company), pp. 52, | 


54, 57, in the essay “Is Life Worth Living?”’ 


ee ee ee ee ee 


=< 





THE PROBLEM OF GOD 175 


deed, gives to the physical world its significance and value, no 
doubt seems to us very beautiful and perhaps true. But to 
many of us it will seem rather poetic and perhaps too religious, 
lacking scientific support, and we shall probably demand a 
firmer and more definite basis for our belief in God. We would 
like to know the attitude of present-day science toward the God 
idea, and the attitude of our modern hard-headed and ‘‘tough- 
minded”’ realistic philosophers. We know, of course, that the 
idealistic philosophers and the ethical philosophers and the theo- 
logians have less difficulty with the problem of God. We know 
that Plato with his Idea of the Good; Aristotle with his Prime 
Mover; the Stoics with their Providence; the neo-Platonists with 
their Ineffable One; the Hebrews with their Jahveh, the righteous 
lawgiver; the Christians with their Christ, the beloved Redeemer; 
the Churchmen with their God the Creator; Spinoza with his one 
Substance, God, and two attributes, mind and matter; Berkeley with 
his Father of Spirits; Kant with his Moral law and God its sanc- 
tion; Hegel with his Absolute Idea; Eucken with his Spiritual. 
Infe; Herbert Spencer with his Infinite and Eternal Energy; + 
Bradley and Royce with their Absolute Experience — that all 
these find God as the very ground or substance of the world. 
But we are not quite sure how far we can trust all these men. 
Our faith in them is great, but it weakens if we mistrust that 
their views are not found in agreement with the science of the 
present day, for our faith in this is still greater. 

A few pages above we spoke of what God means in human ex- 
perience — the personification of all our superlative excellences, 
the embodiment of the primeval powers of Nature, the not-our- 
selves which makes for righteousness, the Over-Soul, and the di- 
vine MORE. Here we are on solid ground; this is what God does 
really mean to us, but what we want to know is whether this God 
exists. 


1 “But one truth must grow ever clearer — the truth that there is an Inscru- 
table Existence everywhere manifested, to which he [the man of science ] can 
neither find nor conceive either beginning orend. Amid the mysteries which be- 
come the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the 
one absolute certainty, that he is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal En- 
ergy, from which all things proceed.’’ — Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology 
(D. Appleton and Company), vol. 11, p. 175. 


176 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Well, anyway, we have discovered one ground for believing in 
God’s existence in James’s striking test, when he shows that in 
physical science when we deal with matter, motion, and energy, 
we are dealing with certain symbols which are useful in interpret- 
ing the facts of outer experience, while in the case of our private 
and personal phenomena as such we are dealing with realities in 
the strictest sense. 

Would it be possible, however, to formulate some conception 
of God which would be in complete harmony with present-day 
science and philosophy and at the same time express what God 
actually means in human experience? Ex-President Eliot at- 
tempted such a formulation as follows: God is an “‘omnipresent 
eternal energy, informing and inspiring the whole creation at 
every instant of time and throughout the infinite space.”” The 
word “‘energy”’ fulfills our desire to ascribe power to God, the 
word “informing” expresses his moulding and creating activity, 
while the word “‘inspiring”’ suggests that God is the source of 
values. 3 

Could these ideas be expanded and made explicit in the follow- 
ing formula? 


God is the soul of the world, an indwelling spiritual presence, a 
creative, organizing and perfecting power, the source of our moral, 
religious, and estheive ideals. 


This, perhaps, is nearly what God means to us — a spiritual 
presence, a creative power, an exponent of righteousness, beauty, 
and love. Do science and philosophy confirm us in the hope 
that such a being really exists? 

In the preceding chapters, as we have been studying the na- 
ture of life and its evolution, we have seen that it is necessary to 
assume some creative agency at every stage of the evolutionary 
movement, not only in the original organization of atoms into 
molecules and of molecules into living cells, but also of living cells 
into higher and higher forms of life — all the way up to man. 
Evolution is a creative process and implies some organizing, in- 
tegrating, and perfecting agency. It has even been suggested 
that there is a present-day creation of matter from simpler 


THE PROBLEM OF GOD 177 


elements, and the constant creation of life at the organic level. 

It would seem, if we would speak of elemental things, that the 
direction and codrdination of energies is as elemental as the ener- 
gies themselves. In the scientific thought of the day the energy 
concept is very fundamental. Matter itself may be reducible to 
energy. But the energy concept itself is full of difficulties and un- 
certainties. It is a symbol, useful in science, standing for what- 
ever it is that effects changes and does work. Its expressions are 
quantitative rather than qualitative, and if we ask what energy 
really 7s, physical science cannot tell us. The hypothesis that 
that mysterious thing which we call energy is something psychi- 
cal, something like mind, has, as we shall learn in a succeeding 
chapter, been a favorite one in philosophy and has often been 
proposed by physicists themselves. Such an hypothesis as this 
would give us an idealistic view of the world, reducing the whole 
‘physical’? Universe to ‘“‘mind-energy’’ — and this mind-en- 
ergy would be God. ‘This view seems to harmonize science and 
religion, and has, of course, been held in many of our great sys- 
tems of philosophy. 

Lofty and inspiring as this world view is, it seems to me that 
the tendency is somewhat away from it now. ‘This is not what 
God means to us in actual human discourse. ‘“‘God,’” says 
James, “‘in the religious life of ordinary men, is the name not of 
the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal tendency 
in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to 
codperate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are 
worthy.”’! However fundamental the energy concept may 
seem to us, there are other concepts which are equally profound. 
There is something in the Universe perhaps more elemental than 
either energy or matter, namely, the direction of energy. Just as 
in psychology we have learned that there is something more ele- 
mental than sensation, perception, and thought — namely, im- 
pulse, the conative tendencies, hunger, and craving; and just as 
in biology we have suspected that deeper than organic life itself 
there is some elemental struggle for life, so in the whole world I 


1 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Longmans, Green and Company), 
p. 124. 


“178° INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


think we may believe that there is some original impulse which is 
making for order and structure and life and mind — and perhaps 
for righteousness. ‘These are the eternal values. God, there- 
fore, is not energy, but creative activity; and not merely creative 
activity, but ‘‘ideal tendency.” 

The human mind is so constituted that it must believe in pro- 
gress. Progress of some kind there must be, if it signifies only 
those orderly changes toward greater complexity and higher or- 
ganization which go by the name of evolution. But there is evi- 
dence that evolution in the broader sense means more than this. 
It means, according to Edwin Grant Conklin,! not merely or- 
derly and progressive change, but progression toward increased 
codperation and specialization. It means, according to William 
Patten,? that there is a common creative agency, a progressive, 
creative, constructive process, looking always toward codpera- 
tion and mutual service. Deeper down in the roots of the evo- 
lutionary movement than the ruthless struggle for existence, 
there is another power at work, whose aim is constructive, altru- 
istic, and benevolent. 

We seem justified, therefore, in saying that there is in the 
world some fundamental agency whose work is that of an inte- 
grating, organizing, perfecting power — a power that works for 
wholeness, for unity, for individuality, perhaps for codperation 
and righteousness. Underneath all our over-beliefs “rests the 
basic fact that God exists — that there is an Ideal working itself 
out in the historic process, a great Power irresistibly drawing us 
on to some far-off and unknown goal, and demanding our entire 
allegiance.” 3 


God as the source of ideals 

Finally, have we any grounds for believing that God is the 
source of our moral, religious, and esthetic ideals? Well, these 
ideals exist in man, and man isa part of the world. Some source 
of these ideals there must be. History seems to be a process of 


1 See his book, The Direction of Human Evolution, referred to above, p. 140. 
2 See his book, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, referred to above, p. 1386-40. 
2 Durant Drake, Problems of Religion, p. 147. 


a 


THE PROBLEM OF GOD 179 


the realization of ideals. Although present social, political, and 
economic conditions are probably better than they ever were in 
the past,! they seem very imperfect to us, and we are dissatisfied 
with them. Our ideals are always above our practice. Wecom- 
plain about the social injustice of our present social order and are 
making great and successful efforts to correctit. Yet, as we look 
back, we see no age so advanced in this respect as our own. In 
the days of slavery, we envisaged freedom and won it. In the 
days of economic slavery, we envisaged economic freedom and 
are winning it. Through this vision of ideals and the struggle to 
realize them, we have gained the emancipation of our women from 
an absurd position of inequality; we have asserted the right of 
our children to be freed from labor and to have the privilege of 
education. We have protested against autocracy and affirmed 
the principles of democracy; and now we are hoping to abolish 
war and devise some system of international codperation. Any 
reader can multiply at will illustrations of the progress of human- 
ity in the realization of ideals. 

But whence come these ideals? Do we create them as we go 
along? If so, evolution is again creative, and creative of values, 
moral and esthetic, than which we can conceive of nothing 
higher. If science permits such an interpretation of the world 
process, surely religion should be satisfied, for a creative energy 
such as this meets our conception of the divine. 

But are the values, on the other hand, not created as we go 
along, but eternal types, patterns, verities, realities, essences? 
Is there a system of zdeal values, in which our ideals ‘‘subsist,’’ us- 
ing the language of recent writers? There is a perennial appeal 
in the ancient Platonic teaching. We may think of these ideal 
values as not only real, but as possessing agency or efficiency, ‘‘an 
efficiency which would seem to be confirmed by the fact that hu- 
man beings are actuated by ideals that have never yet received con- 
crete existential form. For who would be so rash as to maintain, 
e.g., that any society of men has ever yet attained the ideal of an 


1 We shall in the following chapter find reasons for believing that this is true. 
A World War may easily introduce a degree of political, social, and even moral 
chaos for a time. 


180 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


organization in which perfect justice is rendered toall? Yet who 
among thinking men denies that this ideal is something to strug- 
gle and to strive for? And upon whom does the efficiency of this 
ideal not fall with compelling force?’ ! 

It would seem, therefore, that the conception of God as the 
soul of the world, an immanent spiritual power, a creative and 
perfecting agency, the source of our ideal values, may give us a 
helpful notion of God, which shall be consistent both with science 
and philosophy and with the meaning of the word God in com- 
mon speech. 


The spirit that denies 

Our modern world has placed great emphasis upon the energy 
concept. We are living just now in the biological age, and the 
ideas of activity, growth, struggle, development, achievement, 
have become almost an obsession. We want to control every- 
thing and to govern. We want forever to create something new, 
and we judge of the value of anything by what it can accomplish. 
Efficiency is the idol of the age, and the God we believe in is an 
efficient God. The ancient Greeks looked at all this differently. 
They thought that the world of higher realities was not one to be 
made or achieved, but one to be contemplated, appropriated, and 
enjoyed. They looked up to the things that be, not forward to 
the things that are to be made, and they looked up with wonder, 
admiration, and even worship, desiring not to conquer, but to 
understand and enjoy.2 There is something about this older 
Greek notion of limits which commends itself to us. Our mod- 
ern gospel of efficiency has been quite disappointing in its 
results. The twentieth century sees threatening clouds of doubt 
rising to trouble us. Our doctrine of an efficient God does not 
now seem quite adequate. We feel more like emphasizing other 
divine attributes — not God’s infinity, omniscience, and omnipo- 
tence as in former times, but rather the ideal values which after — 
all constitute God’s chief meaning to us; and we are beginning to 


1 £.G.Spaulding, The New Rationalism (Henry Holt and Company), pp. 516-17. 
2 This thought has been developed in a forceful manner by George P. Adams 
in his admirable book entitled Idealism and the Modern Age. 





THE PROBLEM OF GOD 181 


see that the ideal values are not energy of the efficient type, but 
power of the integrating type, and harmony and balance and 
unity and proportion. God is righteousness and God is love. 
Yes, possibly God is even “the spirit that denies.” 

For the last fifty years, under the influence of Darwin and his 
doctrine of variation, struggle, and survival of the fittest, we 
have come to over-emphasize the affirmative, self-assertive, and 
self-expressive virtues and to prize too little the virtues of re- 
straint and self-control and balance and sacrifice. It was in the 
form of a reaction against an over-repressive age that William 
Blake a hundred and fifty years ago launched his new gospel of 
vitality and affirmation. It is the devil, he taught, not God, who 
says, ‘‘Thou shalt not.”? Since then a host of writers have held 
aloft the flag of revolt against law and convention and authority 
and tradition and the repression of our deepest instincts and long- 
ings. The absolute which they worship is ‘‘the absolute affirma- 
tion of energy,’ which until the close of the Great War domi- 
nated the world. Rousseau and Nietzsche and Ibsen and Bernard 
Shaw and Bergson and Browning have been the leaders in the 
philosophy of energy and affirmation. In Nietzsche, the “‘ Yes- 
sayer,” it appears in its extreme form. Let us say “ Yes” to our 
desires, to our instincts, to our natural passions, to our inner 
needs. Let ussay “‘ Yes” to our longings for empire, to our Kul- 
tur. Let us say “ Yes” to our political, economic, and commer- 
cial ambitions. Let us say “‘ Yes” to our individual traits, to our 
budding genius, to our personality, to our need of self-expression. 

And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin. 

But the philosophy of expansion and affirmation has not 
turned out so well in practice as we had hoped. The Great War 
was its fruit, and the events since the war have still further 
_ shown its defects. And so we are coming to emphasize some- 
_ what less the notion of efficiency and energy and somewhat more 
that of measure and reason; and I think we are beginning to 
understand that God is not a mere creator in the sense of a mov- 
ing cause or an evolutionary urge but rather the creator in the 
sense of a constructive, integrating, and perfecting power, the 


182 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


power which makes for wholeness and beauty and truth and 
righteousness — yes, also, for restraint and harmony and obedi- 
ence and love and coéperation. The presence of such a power 
in the world helps us to understand not only the ideal tendency 
in things, not only the vision of ideals in the soul of man, but it 
clarifies immensely the coming and the progress of life in nature 
and its evolution to higher and higher forms. How this agency 
becomes effective in nature perhaps we cannot yet determine, 
but at least some difficulties might be met if we should think of 
it not as a driving force but as a drawing power. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance (Houghton 
Mifflin Company), chap. x1. 


Further references: 
Arthur C. McGiffert, The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas (The Macmillan 
Company), chaps. x, XI, XII. 


William E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience. (Yale 
University Press.) 

Josiah Royce, The Conception of God. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Arthur J. Balfour, Theism and Humanism. (George H. Doran Company.) 

A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philos- 
ophy. (Oxford University Press.) 

Richard La Rue Swain, What and Where IsGod? (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 

John Fiske, Through Nature toGod. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 

G. A. Coe, Religion of a Mature Mind (Revell, Chicago), chap. xm. 

James Ward, The Realm of Ends. (G. P. Putnam’s Sons.) 

James B. Pratt, Psychology of Religious Belief (The Macmillan Com- 


pany), chaps. 1x, x. Also The Religious Consciousness (The Mac- 
millan Company), chap. x. 


Francis J. McConnell, The Diviner Immanence. (Eaton and Mains.) 


Arthur K. Rogers, The Religious Conception of the World (The Macmillan 
Company), pp. 121-97. 
Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


Durant Drake, Problems of Religion (Houghton Mifflin Company), chap. 
1x. Also “Seekers after God,” in Harvard Theological Review, Janu- 
ary, 1919. 


ae” 


CHAPTER XI 
PESSIMISM 


Is there a problem of evil? 

TuHE existence of evil is one of the older difficulties which has 
caused perplexity to students of philosophy through all the cen- 
turies from the earliest times. The author of that ancient dra- 
matic masterpiece called the Book of Job was perhaps the first to 
labor with the problem. Sophocles — he who ‘‘saw life steadily 
and saw it whole” — still wondered how the gods could look 
down complacently upon so much suffering and sorrow; and 
later, in Persia, Omar gave up the riddle of explaining human 
sorrows and proposed the easier method of drowning them in 
the ‘juice of the vine.” * 

At the present day the problem of evil has to some extent lost 
its historic interest, partly because, owing to the economic revo- 
lution bringing great increase of wealth and material comforts, 
and owing to the advancement of science with its partial conquest 
of disease and pain, there are actually fewer evils to explain; 
partly also because, in the conquest of nature and in the posses- 
sion of new continents, mankind has been too busy to think 
about its evils; and finally, because the theory of evolution has 
changed the whole idea of “‘creation,”’ disclosing a wholly new 
scheme of things in which evil has its distinct place. Later writ- 
ers are no longer asking why there should be evil in the world, but 
why there should not be. The modern point of view is different 
from the ancient. The ancients, with their contemplative atti- 
tude toward nature, simply saw the evil, wondered at it, and tried 
to explain it; we, with our more pragmatic minds, granting that 
there are still evils a plenty all about us, propose the task, not of 
explaining them, but of overcoming them. As one writer says: 


1 Tf any one contemplates making experimental trial of Omar’s method of solv- 
ing the problem of evil, it would be well first to read Chesterton’s essay, entitled 
‘Omar and the Sacred Vine,” in his Heretics. 


184 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Modern thought takes evil, not as a given fact, but as something 
which is capable of being transformed, and made to be that which we 
choose to have it be. It does not find the world good or bad. It sets 
out to make the world good, and it is able to do this because it has the 
source of good within a self who can master events.? 


The difficulty stated 

Nevertheless, we must see whether there 7s a kind of problem 
here, and if so whether it resists solution. A very popular way of 
dealing with the subject is simply to say that evil is a “‘mystery”’; 
that it must have some place in the divine plan, but that this is 
hidden from mankind: perhaps evil is just disciplinary. Possi- 
bly there is here a quaint survival of the ancient fear of the jeal- 
ousy of the gods, a feeling that it is safer not to be too inquisitive 
about such things. But the student of philosophy cannot take 
either this timorous attitude toward the subject or that self- 
confident one of the pragmatist just mentioned. He must probe 
and inquire endlessly, shrinking from no interrogation. 

Any one who writes upon the philosophy of good and evil en- 
counters a peculiar difficulty. It is this — that the sympathy of 
the reader is almost always with the one who speaks of the sor- 
rows of the world rather than of the joys. The optimist, or even 
the meliorist, has at the very start a handicap. No one likes to 
be told what a good world this is. A pessimist has been defined 
as a man who has to live with an optimist. This powerful con- 
viction in the minds of so many that there is something essen- 
tially wrong with the world is one fact that must be reckoned 
with whether we will or not. I shall, therefore, in the pages to 
follow, point out some of the grounds for believing that the 
presence of evil in the world — even a good deal of it — does not 
justify any arraignment of Nature or of God. But I hope that I 
may present these reasons without dogmatism, reserving to a 
later paragraph a recognition of unsolved factors and of the 
presence of certain unanswered psychological problems. Per- 
haps the pessimist will go thus far with me that he will see the 
force of certain arguments for a brighter world view. Mean- 
while the query may abide with us whether our conviction of the 

1 Arthur Kenyon Rogers, The Religious Conception of the World, p. 256. 


PESSIMISM 185 


‘essential evil of the world does not arise from the fact of the very 
large demands that we make upon life. 

This is the way the difficulty is usually stated: If God created 
the world, or if he sustains, manages, or supervises it, and if God 
is infinitely good, how shall we explain all the pain and evil, all 
the sin and sorrow and suffering, and all the thwarted plans and 
disappointed hopes which are evident everywhere? If he could 
not prevent them, he is not God; if he could and does not, 
he is not good. 

The whole argument rests upon an anthropomorphic view, as 
if God in heaven, contemplating the creation of a world, sits 
down to meditate on what kind of a world to make, and then fore- 
seeing all the sin and evil and the pain and suffering and sorrow, 
nevertheless with malice aforethought issues the creative fiat. 

But the world did not come into being in any such way. Just 
as soon as we cease to think of it as a “‘plan”’ and begin to think 
of it as a growth, a development, a realization of values, our diffi- 
culties begin to disappear. It all seems different when we think 
of God no longer as a monarch, but as the power which makes for 
righteousness, perhaps working with us to overcome every ob- 
stacle to good. As higher and higher levels of good are succes- 
sively realized, the lower levels become evils. In geological time, 
when only simple forms of animal life were found upon the earth, 
the evils of which we so bitterly complain did not exist. When 
man arrived with his power of rational thought, God did not cre- 
ate the evils, nor did man create them, nor even discover them. 
He discovered a better way of doing things, whereupon the older 
way became an “evil.”’ Social organization and coéperation, for 
instance, represent a better way, a new value; whereupon egoism 
and narrow individualism become evils. With our widening so- 
cial and economic interests, internationalism represents a new 
value, so that a selfish nationalism becomes an evil. In early 
times war served a purpose in making social groups strong and 
sturdy; now conditions have changed, and war is under judg- 
ment and will have to go. Sympathy and love are values of 
the highest order, as are personality, rational and voluntary 
choice, and conscience. It seems as if Nature has labored 


186 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


to bring them forth; when they were born, the older ways be- 
came evils. 

As we advance, the virtues of one age become the vices of the 
next. We get very sensitive, critical, conscientious, as new 
ideals disclose themselves. Some years ago Professor Ross wrote 
a book called Sin and Society, describing a brand-new set of sins 
which changing social conditions had brought forth, many of 
them hitherto being merely customary practices. 

This does not mean that good and evil are just relative terms. 
It seems rather that there are certain ideals to be attained, and in 
struggling to attain them obstacles are encountered. These ob- 
stacles are real, and offer real resistance to the good; they must 
be overcome. 


Moral evil 

It has sometimes been the fashion to catalogue the evils of the 
world under three classes: first, metaphysical evils or imperfec- 
tions in nature, such as earthquakes, cyclones, drought, and 
flood; second, physical and mental evils, such as pain and suffer- 
ing and death; and third, moral evils, such as sin and wickedness. 
By enumerating and parading these, a pretty severe indictment 
may be drawn against Nature, or against God as creator. 

Of these three classes, moral evil is clearly the worst. We are 
amazed sometimes at the revelations of wickedness in every part 
of the world: injustice and cruelty, greed and hate, vice and 
crime, domestic tangles and divorce, exploitation of labor and 
oppression of the weak, murder and theft, smuggling and boot- 
legging, intemperance and drunkenness, gambling and prostitu- 
tion, bribery and adulteration, avarice and profligate spending, 
and unashamed and unrestrained revelry and frivolity. Talk 
about such a world being the best possible one, or even a good 
one, or even a decent one! 

Probably no philosopher now would be interested to show that 
- 1 Such an indictment may be found, for instance, in John Stuart Mill’s Three 
Essays on Religion, pp. 28 ff., or in A. J. Balfour’s Foundations of Belief, pp. 33, 
34. In Bertrand Russell’s ‘‘A Free Man’s Worship,’’ in his Mysticism and Logic, 


chap. 11, may be found a more recent plaint over a ‘‘pitiless’’ and “‘hostile’’ 
world. 


PESSIMISM 187 


this is the best possible world, but the mere enumeration of a list 
of sins such as these is no proof that this is not a good world, or 
even the best one possible. It would be still easier to enumerate 
a list of virtues; they are so obvious that they would not be 
interesting. A list of crimes always makes better reading, be- 
cause they are the striking exceptions to the daily life of a given 
time. ‘‘Sins” appear at that stage of evolution when man 
emerges as a moral being. Had the evolutionary process been 
stopped at that level, there would have been no moral evil in 
the world, but such a world would not have been as “‘good”’ as 
this one. There would have been no sin, to be sure; but there 
would have been no moral conduct of any kind, only animal 
behavior and instinctive action. A moral order involving con- 
science, freedom, rational choice and growth, seems better. 


The point of view is now different | 

If you or I had the task of planning a world, we should hesi- 
tate, after thinking it over, to plan one without pain or evil. It 
might prove to be ‘‘ weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” It all 
seems very different from our modern energetic, dynamic, and 
biological point of view. We are not so sure whether it would be 
well for us to be eternally happy. We assign higher value now to 
growth through conflict. If there were no evil and no tempta- 
tion, there would be no victory over evil and no character. We 
place more emphasis now upon character than upon happiness. 
A race of sinless beings would not be perfect beings — they 
would be a race of innocents; and while we prize innocence in 
children, we prize force of character in men — the ability to 
stand firmly against temptation, to overcome and conquer evil. 
With the passing of the hedonistic ethics, which emphasized 
pleasure or happiness as the end of life, the problem of evil has 
changed. What the man of to-day wants is to achieve rather 
than to enjoy. He likes something of adventure and of risk, and 
perhaps even of pain, if great things may perchance be won. 
Even death may be looked upon in this way. It is reported of 
Charles Frohman, the theatrical manager, who went down with 
the Lusitania, that he said, as the ship was struck by the torpedo, 


188 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


‘“Why should we fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure 
in life’; a sentiment anticipated by Browning: 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 

Once more on my adventure brave and new. 

Lucretius, at the opening of the second book of the De Rerum 
Natura, says: 

It is sweet, when on the great sea the winds trouble its waters, to be- 
hold from land another’s deep distress; not that it is a pleasure and de- 
light that any should be afflicted, but because it is sweet to see from 
what evils you are yourself exempt. It is sweet also to look upon the 
mighty struggles of war arrayed along the plains without sharing your- 
self in the danger.! 


This ‘‘safety first’? motto might do for an Epicurean poet or 
serve as a prudent caution at a busy metropolitan street crossing, 
but as a rule of life it does not appeal to us. We sympathize 
more with the mood of James, at the close of his lecture entitled 
Is Infe Worth Lnving? 

But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there 
will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here de- 
clined to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the 
tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: ‘Hang yourself, 
brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there.” 


Man is a striving animal. Happiness is not found in rest or 
in freedom from pain, but in the activity of his powers, especially 
in the creative activity of his highest powers, of reason, thought, 
invention, artistic creation, and humanitarian effort. We are 
not impressed by the attitude of the man in the story who had 
partially recovered from a stroke of some kind and said to his 
physician: “I sleep better than ever before, I have a better appe- 
tite than ever before, and in general am happier than ever before. 
To be sure, I have lost my mind, but I don’t miss it.”” The re- 
tired farmer is seldom as happy as he thought he was going to be 
in his new house in town with its bathroom and library and mod- 
ern conveniences. ‘That long-dreamed-of leisure is not so desir- 
able as it had seemed in prospect. The old days on the farm, 


1 Munro’s translation. 


PESSIMISM 189° 


with their problems to be solved and their recurrent joys of fields 

ploughed and harvests gathered, have no compensations in the 
life of rest. There is a good homely philosophy in the saying 
that if you get done all that you set out to do, you didn’t set out 
to do enough. 

So, finally, although we can formulate the phrase ‘‘a world 
without evil,” the words can have no distinct meaning. In that 
perfect and happy world in which there is no evil, pain, or sor- 
row, I think there are some things we should miss. We should 
miss our Browning with his ‘‘jagged phraseology of struggle and 
strife’; our Dante with his Hell and Purgatory and redeeming 
love; our Goethe with his gospel of salvation through rich human 
experience; our Lincoln with his knit brow and sad sympathetic 
face; our Raphael with his Sistine Madonna; our Shakespeare 
with his stories of Macbeth and Lear; our A¢schylus with his 
dramas of tempestuous fate, and our Jesus with his gospel of 
redemption. 


Physical pain and natural evil 

Much of the sorrow and suffering of the world are due to igno- 
rance or to willful violation of the laws of nature, or of society. 
Physical pain is Nature’s beneficent warning of approaching dis- 
ease or abnormal function. A toothache bids us hasten to our 
dentist to minister to a decaying tooth. Disease follows upon 
the slackening of that eternal vigilance which keeps us strong and 
well and alert to danger. If people will live in unsanitary ways, 
neglect out-of-door exercise, eat unwholesome foods or eat too 
much or at the wrong time, drink stimulants or narcotics, use 
drugs to cover up their troubles, wear insufficient or too much 
clothing, seal themselves in overheated houses, indulge in too 
much or too feverish social life, violate the laws of social purity 
which society has found necessary for its welfare, substitute an 
indoor night life for the outdoor day life natural to mankind, 
why, of course, something unpleasant is bound to happen. If 
moral laws or the laws of nature are violated, we can perhaps es- 
cape punishment, but we cannot escape consequences; and the 
reason is very simple, since our moral laws are for the most part 


190 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the product of the experience of the race as to the conditions of so- 
cial survival. Unspeakable calamities in many families could be 
traced back to some form of vice either in the sufferer or his par- 
ents or grandparents. If the evils do not always fall upon the 
head of the offender, this is due to the law of social solidarity, 
from which we gain more than we lose. 

Pessimists sometimes make much of natural evils, such as 
the internecine warfare among animals, human warfare, death, 
storm, flood, drought, and earthquake. We hear of Nature’s cru- 
elty and of her wastefulness. Some of these evils present little 
difficulty; others, more. As man develops in culture and refine- 
ment, he becomes exquisitely sensitive to pain and evil, and he 
reads down his own feelings and sensitiveness into the lower or- 
ders of animal life and into other times and conditions. The 
will-to-live makes death seem terrible to many people, particu- 
larly to the young. But life and death are correlative terms and 
we could not have one without the other. You and I would not 
be here unless past generations had died to make room for us. 
In William Watson’s poem, The Dream of Man, man, over- 
coming all obstacles, finally overcame death, but he bitterly re- 
pented this till a sympathetic God restored it. 

The indictment of Nature as prodigally wasteful comes from a 
childish misunderstanding. A single elm tree showers down ten 
thousand seeds, each one a miracle of potencies. Of these per- 
haps one — more likely none — falls into a favoring soil and 
grows into a tree. When we call this ‘‘ wasteful,” we are evi- 
dently judging it from a certain human economic standpoint 
where waste and improvidence lead to future want. Call it “‘lib- 
erality,” “generosity,”’ ‘“lavishness,’’ and the difficulty disap- 
pears. Each seed is a potential tree, to be sure; but the “‘trag- 
edy”’ of it, ‘‘the blighted hopes,” are imaginary evils reflected 
back from our human standpoint. 

_ One writer says: “‘There are tens of thousands of horrible fail- 
ures to one real advance in evolution. It has been by destroying 
the results of its mistakes that the process has moved toward 
higher forms. Millions of years of struggle, involving the de- 
struction of countless organisms, have brought the world to the 


~ 


PESSIMISM 191 


present.” Here the expression “horrible failures” involves a fal- 
lacy. From the point of view of the individual in these passing 
species, life might appear quite normal and happy. You and I 
may be very happy, and yet ages hence the race to which we be- 
long might be supplanted by a better one. It seems to us awful 
that one species should prey upon another, yet any individual, in 
the species preyed upon, lives his normal life and suffers death 
in the manner peculiar to the species. The fact that the species 
continues indicates an adjustment to its environment, and such 
adjustment represents the external conditions of welfare in that 
species and presumably happiness. 

Such natural calamities as storms and earthquakes have some- 


_ times seemed incompatible with divine benevolence. One recalls 


Voltaire’s famous poem on the earthquake at Lisbon when the 
walls of the churches tumbled down upon the worshipers, refut- 
ing the smiling optimism of Pope. But the Earth’s surface is 
gradually getting more and more stable. Earthquakes are rare 
and their area very limited. Experience has shown that a know- 
ledge of earthquake areas does not deter men from going there 
to live. They are willing to take the risk involved for the advan- 
tages to be gained. Suppose that Nature had some way of label- 
ing her earthquake areas, saying to man, ‘‘ Enter here at your 
own risk.” If these offered fair fields for cultivation, rich depos- 
its of coal, mineral, or oil, maritime advantages, or pleasure re- 
sorts, no one can doubt that they would soon be thickly popu- 
lated. If we go back in geological history, we should doubtless 
find that earthquakes, storms, and cataclysms were more and 
more frequent, but wherever the conditions are such that life be- 
comes possible, some species fitted to the environment appears 
speedily taking possession. It is the insurgency of life. 

So with respect to storm and flood. If with the crashing of the 
thunder and the fury of the cyclone, Nature seems to be malevo- 
lent, it is because her benevolence, seen in the fertility of the soil, 
the unfailing recurrence of the seasons, the almost miraculous 
regularity of the rains, alternating with the life-bringing sun- 
shine, are forgotten because of their constant presence. 

As regards the cruelty of Nature, the notion that man has been 


192 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


evolved at the expense of lower forms of life, who have sacrificed 
their lives for him, belongs to the literature of rhetorical pessi- 
mism. Even James thoughtlessly falls into this error. 

When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have 
had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their lives 
that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in com- 
_ fort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the 
universe in a more solemn light. ‘‘ Does not,” as a young Amherst phi- 
losopher (Xenos Clark, now dead) once wrote, ‘‘the acceptance of a 
happy life upon such terms involve a point of honor?” Are we not 
bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some self-denying 
service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon which ours 
are built? To hear this question is to answer it in but one possible 
way, if one have a normally constituted heart. 


Something similar to this is often heard from the vegetarian 
who will eat no meat because it involves the death of innocent an- 
imals. He forgets that, if all the American people should refrain 
from eating meat, the millions of fat cattle, sheep, and hogs on 
our farms and ranches would not be bred at all. As it is, their 
lives, from the animal point of view, are the happiest possible. 
They are sheltered from all the dangers that constantly threaten 
wild animals. Regular and unlimited food is provided without 
their effort. They are free from pain and disease. They have 
no fear of death, and while death indeed comes, it comes to all 
animals, and to the wild animals in a much more painful form, 
perhaps after desperate battle or flight, perhaps after weeks of 
starvation. The vegetarian may possibly urge hygienic but not 
humanitarian motives. 


Pessimism 

Pessimism in philosophy is the doctrine that life is essentially 
evil, that there is more pain in the world than pleasure, more 
evil than good. It is not difficult to make many of us believe 
this, because pain and evil, being the exception rather than the 
rule, attract our attention. Pain indicates abnormal function, 
and is therefore exceptional in normal life. Moral evil indicates 
a departure from those rules of conduct which experience has 
shown to be necessary for social welfare. Since social groups 


PESSIMISM 193 


usually survive and prosper, moral evil must be the exception 
rather than the rule. 

Arthur Schopenhauer, a talented German philosopher of the 
nineteenth century, has been called the prince of pessimists. He 
attempted a logical proof that this is the worst possible world. 
The Will is the fundamental reality. The ‘“will-to-live”’ is for- 
ever urging us on, blindly seeking satisfaction which is never at- 
tained, or, if attained, is succeeded by new desire. Life is eternal 
striving, a desire for the unrealized. Hence life is full of unsatis- 
fied longing, full of misery and suffering. This is the worst possi- 
ble world, for if the evil forces which prey upon us were any 
worse than they are, we could not survive.! 

The fallacies in Schopenhauer’s reasoning are not difficult to 
detect. Hesays that all life is suffering, because it is all striving, 
and striving is suffering. Life is by no means all striving, though 
striving accompanies it. But that striving is suffering is not 
true; it may be and usually is quite the opposite. Successful 
striving may be counted as life’s greatest joy; striving that is not 
successful is still a pleasure. Great is the joy of the vision of a 
coveted goal; greater still the joy of trying to attain it; and great 
is the satisfaction of having attained it. Even if we fail, there is 
joy in trying, and what right have we to assume that failure is 
normal? More often we succeed than fail. We expect to succeed, 
and so are more impressed by the failures. This whole matter of 
the pessimistic or optimistic attitude depends much upon the 
emotional reaction of the individual, and it is easy to confirm 
either the philosophy of despair or the philosophy of joy by seiz- 
ing upon, emphasizing, and exaggerating either the sorrows or the 
joys of life. Schopenhauer himself was a genius, and genius is 
often associated with psychopathic traits. Such traits, indeed, 
abounded in his family history, sometimes in extreme forms. 

Schopenhauer’s other argument — designed to prove that this 
is the worst possible world from the fact that, if the evils in it were 

1 Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 and died in 1860. His principal work 
iscalled The World as Willand Idea. 1tisa work of high literary and philosophi- 
cal merit, and has become a classic in philosophy. For Schopenhauer’s pessi- 


mism, the student should read vol. 111, chap. xvi, ‘‘On the Vanity and Suffering 
of Life.’ 


194 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


any worse than they are, we could not survive — is also mislead- 
ing. Theoretically it is true that if the environment in which 
any animal species lives were different from what it is, that spe- 
cies would be different. Each species is adjusted to its environ- 
ment. Hence in a way it is true that if the world were either 
worse or better than it is, we should not survive; we should be 
modified to meet the new conditions. Practically, of course, our 
human environment might be much worse or better than it is 
without leading to our destruction. 


The causes of pessimism 

Pessimism may be considered as a disease, its causes diagnosed 
and its cure prescribed. It was formerly said to be due to a de- 
fective liver, but is now attributed to a failure of the endocrine 
glands to function. It becomes chronic and the cure is difficult. 
Perhaps something of this kind ailed Carlyle. It is related that 
he was once walking with Leigh Hunt, who called his attention to 
the beauty of the stars and the grandeur of the heavens, but Car- 
lyle said, “‘ Eh, it’s a sad sight!” 

Melancholia represents an extreme form of the complaint, 
when, owing to pathological nervous conditions, everything, even 
the singing of the birds in the spring, is tinged with an unspeak- 
able sadness. Often it takes lesser forms, and is then sometimes 
due to a lack of proper balance between the sensory and motor 
functions of the nervous system. Man is naturally and physio- 
logically an actor, a doer. Stimulus is followed normally by re- 
sponse; and if for any reason no adequate motor outlet is pos- 
sible, a pathological condition follows, leading perhaps to some 
degree of melancholy. 

College and university students sometimes pass through such a 
period of forced inaction, spending four years in taking in and as- 
similating material, but being forced to bide their time for action 
and achievement. Athletics and extra-curricular activities of all 
kinds then act as a kind of catharsis, purifying the mind from 
these disorders, but sometimes at too great a cost, since valuable 
opportunities for study may be lost, or health impaired. Stu- 
dents who must have a lot of extra-curricular activities in order to 


PESSIMISM 195 


keep from getting pessimistic no doubt suffer a certain handicap 
in future life. Those who can keep the cobwebs out of their 
brains while they lay in a stock of useful knowledge and disci- 
plinary thinking will perhaps be the ones who forge ahead in the 
end, provided only physical health is not sacrificed. 

There are other causes why young people are often pessimistic. 
The vast enthusiasms and idealisms of adolescent years are often 
quenched and dimmed when the first real contact comes with 
life: Disillusionment and disappointment follow, sometimes 
with thoughts of suicide. 

David Starr Jordan puts it in this way: 


The joys of life have been a thousand times felt before they come to 
-us. We are but following part of a cut-and-dried program, ‘‘ perform- 
ing actions and reciting speeches made up for us centuries before we 
were born.”” The new power of manhood and womanhood which seemed 
so wonderful find their close limitations. As our own part in the Uni- 
verse seems to shrink as we take our place in it, so does the Universe it- 
self seem to grow small, hard and unsympathetic. Very few young men 
or young women of strength and feeling fail to pass through a period of 
pessimism. With some it is merely an affectation caught from the cheap 
literature of decadence. It then may find expression in imitation, as a ° 
few years ago the sad-hearted youth turned down his collar in sym- 
pathy with the ‘‘ conspicuous loneliness” that took the starch out of the 
collar of Byron. ‘The youth,” says Zangwill, “says bitter things about 
life which Life would have winced to hear had it been alive.” With 
others Pessimism has deeper roots and finds its expression in the poetry 
or philosophy of real despair! } 


With the time for action all this pessimism may disappear. 

Another cause for pessimism. is found in the attempt to fill our 
lives with unearned joys. ‘These abound in a civilization like ours 
when a highly organized and wealthy society showers upon us 
comforts and conveniences which we have not earned. Wealth 
which is inherited, not earned, sometimes has a similar effect 
upon individuals. Work cures pessimism of this kind, especially 
creative and constructive work. 


The latest gospel in this world is, Know thy work and doit. ‘‘Know 
thyself:’’ long enough has that poor “self” of thine tormented thee; 


1 David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, pp. 13, 14. 


196 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


thou wilt never get to ‘‘know”’ it, I believe! Think it not thy business, 
this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: Know 
what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will 
be thy better plan. 

It has been written, ‘‘an endless significance lies in work;”’ a man per- 
fects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed- 
fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first 
ceases to be jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider 
how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is 
composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to 
work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, 
all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, 
as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, 
and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their 
caves. The manisnowaman. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is 
it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke 
itself there is made bright blessed flame! ! 


Yes, no doubt this is true of creative and constructive work. 
You and I, if we have found our work, are happy. But what 
about the drudgery of the industrial laborer, or the uninterest- 
ing housework dragging out through the long hours, or the per- 
petual thumping of a typewriter? I suppose that the most con- 
firmed optimist would not undertake to show that in the half 
million years of human history which have elapsed thus far there 
might not be periods when the human species has gone astray 
in its manner of living. When a great many people want a great 
many things to satisfy their ever increasing demands, somebody 
will have to work hard to provide these things. Whether we 
have gone astray in our manner of living since the discovery of 
coal, iron, and oil has revolutionized society, whether our present 
industrial system is a boon or a curse, whether this system might 
be modified so that creative labor could be substituted for drudg- 
ery, or whether the hours of labor might be so reduced that all 
men could find a real joy of life in the eight or ten hours of leisure 
which might then be provided, are questions not belonging here. 

But I would suggest that even this problem might be solved 
if only a part of that amazing inventive power of thought which 
has produced the airplane and the wireless telephone should be 

1 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (Harper and Brothers), p. 197. 


PESSIMISM 197 


turned in the direction of social and industrial betterment. In- 
deed, an age that has projected and put into successful operation 
the League of Nations need not despair of solving some of our 
industrial problems. We are living in a transitional time when 
serious readjustments are necessary. It is worth much to be a 
citizen of the world now in this day of testing and perhaps to 
participate in creating this new world order. If love can conquer 
hate, and codperation take the place of rivalry and distrust, a 
great future lies before us, in the making of which we may be 
proud to have a part. 


Optimism 

Almost as bad as pessimism is a superficial and careless opti- 
mism. Browning’s optimism has been criticized on this ground. 
His Pippa goes singing through her brief holiday, saying, “‘God’s 
in his heaven — all’s right with the world.” But all’s not right 
with the world, as every one knows. Browning’s optimism, how- 
ever, should not be judged by this one line. On the whole it is 
wholesome and sound, based on his belief in God and Truth and 
Love, and on his philosophy of endeavor and progress. Another 
famous optimist was Leibniz, who in his Theodicy proved by ra- 
tional arguments that this is the best possible world. Sir John 
Lubbock in his book, The Pleasures of Life, proceeds by the 
opposite inductive method to an optimistic view of life. 


Our idealism 

But, after all, there is little meaning in either optimism or pes- 
simism. These superlatives are misleading. Looking forward 
and measuring the world by our ideals, we find it bad; looking 
backward and measuring the present by the past, we find it good. 
So, then, the really significant thing is not the goodness or the 
badness of the world, but the progress of it; and still more signifi- 
cant than this is the idealism in the human mind which makes 
every present good seem imperfect in the light of the higher good 
that we conceive. In the philosophy of the present neither opti- 
mism nor pessimism is in good standing. Meliorism has taken its 
place, and it teaches that the world is neither the worst possible 


198 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


nor the best possible, but that it is getting better, and that the 
task before each one of us is to lend a hand in making it better. 

*** Evil, O Glaucon,’ says Socrates in Plato’s Dialogue, ‘will not 
vanish from the earth.’ How should it, if it is the name of the 
imperfection through whose defeat the perfect types acquire 
their value?” } 


The lure of pessimism 

The curious appeal which the literature of pessimism always 
makes is a ‘‘problem”’ in itself, a psychological one. People 
seem to love to write and love to read about the woes of life. If 
the latter is partly explained by the superior literary character of 
the pessimistic writings, this superiority itself presents a problem. 
The beautiful but somber utterances of the Book of Ecclesiastes 
seem to be in little harmony with the other literature of the He- 
brew Bible, yet fascinated readers for more than twenty centu- 
ries have sympathized with the author’s gloomy sentiments. 

Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath 
man of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the sun? 

All things are full of weariness, man cannot utter it, the eye is not 
satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. 


Buddhism offers a particularly pessimistic faith, yet un- 
counted millions have been its devotees. Edwin Arnold thus 
renders some lines from the Devas’s song: 

We are the voices of the wandering wind, 
Which moan for rest, and rest can never find, 


Lo, as the wind is, so is mortal life — 
A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife. 


As translated by Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyém’s Rubdtyat is a 
perennial best-seller. How much of the powerful appeal of these — 
quatrains is due to the somber philosophy and how much to the 
exquisite rendering of the translator? 

Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 


About it and about: but evermore 
Came out by the same door where in I went. 


18. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. u, p. 420. 


PESSIMISM 199 


With them the seed of wisdom did I sow, 

And with my own hand wrought to make it grow; 
And this was all the harvest that I reaped — 

“T came like water and like wind I go.” 


_ Or Byron: 


Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen, 
Count o’er thy days from anguish free, 
And know, whatever thou hast been, 

Tis something better not to be. 


Or James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night: 


Speak not of comfort where no comfort is, 

Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? 
Our life’s a cheat, our death, a black abyss. 

Hush and be mute envisaging despair. 


Or Matthew Arnold: 


Wandering between two worlds, one dead. 
The other powerless to be born, 

With nowhere yet to rest my head, 

Like these on earth I wait forlorn. 


I do not know why we like to read these disconsolate things, 
but they seem to strike a responsive chord. Perhaps itis because 
there are woes enough in the world to make the subject interest- 
ing and not enough to make it flat. Every life has its dark shad- 
ows, and usually we have to keep silent about them. When we 
find some poet, philosopher, or writer of fiction who speaks out 
about them, we feel as if we had found a sympathetic friend. 
For the most part we have to keep smiling, whether we feel like 
smiling or not. So occasionally we slip away to dear old sym- 
pathetic Thomas Hardy, who does not even pretend that the 
world is all good and honest and right, and just let ourselves go. 
It is a kind of relaxation and purification. I wonder, by the 
way, whether the realism in fiction of the present day is truly 
realism, or whether it simply means that the evils of life, form- 
erly not much mentioned, are now truthfully and vividly de- 
scribed, while the good things, being too common to be inter- 
esting, are omitted. 

But perhaps there is some deeper reason for the appeal which 


200 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the poetry of despair makes to so many of us. It is easy to point 
out, as I am doing in this chapter, the grounds for a hopeful 
philosophy of life. But I have little doubt that many readers 
will say, ‘‘Your arguments perhaps are unanswerable but the 
facts are against you. The things that stand out most clearly in 
our lives are disillusionment, defeat, thwarted ambitions, dis- 
appointed hopes. Life’s promises have not been fulfilled, justice 
has not been gained, the glaring inequalities of fortune cannot be 
pardoned in this facile fashion. It is easy for the well-fed theo- 
rist, sitting in his study, to show that the world is good and get- 
ting better — but life’s grim realities lend little support to this 
philosophy of hope. One who writes in this way has not looked 
into the homes of the workers in our great industrial centers nor 
into the hearts of those who have grieved for friends torn from 
their sides. Joy and gladness are theories — evil is a fact.” 

As I said earlier in this chapter, this conviction which many 
feel of the essential evil of the world is one of the facts which any 
philosophy of life must take account of. Professor James be- 
lieves that it is due not to actual evils but to the very opposite. 
Man is by nature a fighter and a conqueror, and is at his best 
when rowing against the stream. ‘‘It is, indeed, a remarkable 
fact,” he says, “‘that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, 
abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give 
it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is reple- 
tion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour 
of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the cap- 
tivity, but those of the days of Solomon’s glory are those from | 
whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.” 

No doubt a part of the pessimism of our day can be explained 
in this way — but I think not all of it. Some is due to our ex- 
cessive demands upon life, and some must be traced to tempo- 
rary industrial and political conditions. Certainly one factor 
here is the consciousness of a kind of injustice arising from 
inequalities in wealth, in social position, in political power. | 
Lives otherwise not embittered may become so by the knowledge 
of supposed joys possessed by others but denied to us. 


PESSIMISM 201 


Is the world as bad as it seems? 

In times of health, physical and mental joys nal preponder- 
ate over pains and sorrows. In times of social prosperity, moral 
good greatly exceeds moral evil. But the interesting question 
arises whether there may not be periods of social decadence in 
which evil preponderates over good; and then comes the still 
more arresting question whether the present is such a time. 
Civilizations rise and fall, each new one attaining higher stand- 
ards than the old. Whether, during periods of decline, the sum 
of pain in a given community or the sum of evil might exceed the 
sum of joy and good, would be a question difficult to answer and 
one perhaps having little meaning. 

In Europe stricken by the war, sorrows multiply; in America 
in a time of prosperity, unnumbered joys abound. A crisis seems 
to have been reached in social evolution, when the art of war will 
have to be unlearned if civilization isto be saved. The people of 
the Earth have now to learn a new lesson, the lesson of coépera- 
tion and peace. Wedo not know yet whether they can learn this 
lesson in time to save our present civilization; but sooner or later 
it will be learned, and then we hope for a new civilization finer 
and better than any we have known. It is possible, though I do 
not think probable, that an interval of social chaos may separate 
our time from that. The vision of the better way is clearly seen 
in so many minds that we cannot doubt the coming of a new so- 
cial order, in which coéperation shall take the place of rivalry and 
distrust. 

Perhaps, though, the present crisis has its roots deeper than 
the alternatives of peace and war. When God creates a master- 
piece like man with freedom to go his own way, there is always 
danger that he will go wrong—fora while. There are some indi- 
cations that he is going wrong now. ‘There are those who think 
that human progress has reached a peak, and that we are riding 
for afall. Weare alarmed now by many signs of danger — the 
declining birth-rate; the increased use of narcotics; a selfish and 
ruthless nationalism; a thirst for alcohol so great as to weaken 
our respect for law; the dangerous urbanization of our social 
groups; the disastrous increase of wealth, leading to idleness, 


202 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


luxury, and vice; the increase of certain forms of organic and 
mental diseases; and the moral dissolution in European society 
following the Great War. 

Just as the violation of the laws of health in the case of the indi- 
vidual may lead to disease and sorrow and pain, so the violation 
by a social group of the laws of social welfare may lead to deca- 
dence. Though it is very doubtful whether our present society 
is decadent or even approaching a period of decadence, there is 
immediate and imperative need that certain evils be summarily 
ended. Organized intelligence can end them. 

In a catalogue of evils such as I have mentioned, as well as in 
the pictures of misery in our crowded cities and industrial cen- 
ters, it is difficult to get a correct perspective. As regards the 
amount of evil in the world, there is certainly enough of it; but 
we are often misled by the fact that as our ethical ideals advance 
we are more impressed by the evil that we see. Railroad and au- 
tomobile travel have become so safe that accidents are paraded 
in headlines. So great advance has been made in morals and 
manners that wrongdoing has become ‘‘news,” and furnishes 
rich material for the first page of our daily papers. Crime makes 
a “sensation,’’ and our sensational journals exploit it for that 
reason. Diogenes is said to have gone through the world with a 
lantern looking for a man. Our news-gatherers of to-day go 
through the world with a hundred-candle-power electric torch 
looking for crime, disaster, accident, or suicide, and keep the 
wires centering in our great cities hot with their stories. AsIam 
writing these words a daily paper liesat my side. The first page 
contains two single and three double columns, all of them with vio- 
lent headlines heralding crime or disaster. We lay down such a 
paper with a sigh, saying, “The world is full of crime and mis- 
ery.” But really the whole world, telegraphically in touch with 
-our daily paper, is combed for news with a fine-tooth comb, and 
things are not so bad as they seem. To emphasize this, it is only 
necessary to turn from that sensational first page and think of 
our neighbors and friends. They are for the most part honest 
and decent folk, whom you could trust with your gun or your 
_ 1! As pictured, for instance, in Sir Philip Gibbs’s story, The Middle of the Road. 


PESSIMISM 203 


daughter, and they have probably just returned from an automo- 
bile ride without an accident. 

Some years ago Sinclair Lewis wrote a ‘‘best-seller” called 
Main Street, in which he painted in vivid colors the drab and sor- 
did life of a typical Mid-Western town. Gopher Prairie was per- 
haps no worse nor better than other towns, but in the story it was 
seen in the shadow of a hopeless mediocrity and vulgarity. The 
picture was more or less a true one; but the evils, while real, were 
eviis only in contrast with the author’s and the reader’s high 
idealism. Another and very different picture, also true, could be 
drawn of the same community. 

Compare, for instance, the lot of those Western people of to- 
_day with those of people of the past. It was not many centuries 
ago when English peasants lived in hovels with dirt floors, slept 
on a pile of straw, and were afflicted with vermin; and we do not 
have to go back further than the age of Themistocles to the time 
when wars were constant and defeat in war meant the razing to 
the ground of the whole town, the violent death of every man, 
and the carrying away of all the women and children to slavery. 
And we do not have to go back further than the best days of 
Rome to the time when, even in days of peace, neither one’s life 
nor property was safe, when one’s most trusted neighbor might 
be a spy, and when freedom of speech was unknown. 

In Sinclair Lewis’s typical Western town the people are practi- 
cally all well-fed, enjoying three good meals a day, and perhaps 
wasting considerable quantities of food. They are nearly all 
comfortably housed, protected from rain and storm and winter’s 
cold. They are for the most part comfortably and tastefully 
clothed. There are free schools for all the children, and colleges, 
universities, training and technical schools are available for those 
who seek them. In the houses there are usually bathrooms, and 
for the most part the people are clean and neat. There is rela- 
- tively little grinding poverty in the social group, work is usually 
obtainable, and there are honest and safe banks for the accumu- 
lation of one’s earnings. In case of sickness there are skillful doc- 
tors and surgeons, and pain is eased by anesthetics. Dentists 
fill or remove painful teeth, providing new ones when necessary. 


204 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Hospitals are found in almost every town, and the State provides 
institutions for the insane, feeble-minded, deaf, and blind, and 
for the cure or care of those afflicted with tubercular and other 
diseases. A stable government makes life and property compar- 
atively safe. Comforts and luxuries abound.! There is perhaps 
a motor car for every five or ten people, and these are largely used 
for pleasure and outings. Newspapers, magazines, and books 
are found in nearly all the homes; moving pictures for a small 
price bring the busy world and the wonders of nature to the 
screen. Nearly every person can read, and probably a free pub- 
lic library offers him the best things from the past in history, 
drama, poetry, science, and philosophy, while books of fiction 
without number provide entertainment and instruction. Even 
in the homes, tables are covered with interesting papers, maga- 
zines, and books. The city is provided with a sanitary and in- 
visible disposal of waste and sewage. Pure running water is 
brought to a large percentage of the houses — perhaps also gas 
and electricity. In most homes telephones are found, permitting 
of instant communication with friends, even in distant cities. A 
great postal system, prompt and reliable, permits of communica- 
tion at a trifling cost with every part of the world. 

All these sources of comfort, peace, and happiness have be- 
come so much a matter of course that we forget them and take 
too seriously a dark picture such as that drawn by Mr. Lewis. 

Possibly there is a real place for an optimist league, such as I 
saw mentioned in a paper some years ago: 

The movement to establish The Optimist League of America may not 


succeed and, if it should succeed, may not accomplish its end; but the | 
circular of information which it sends out contains some facts which 


1In America, it appears that we spend about twenty-three thousand million 
dollars a year for luxuries of all kinds; some of the items are as follows: 

2,000 million for tobacco. 
1,000 million for moving pictures. 
2,000 million for candy. 
3,000 million for joy rides, races, and pleasure resorts. 
2,000 million for cosmetics, perfumes, etc. 

500 million for jewelry. 

850 million for furs. 

3800 million for soft drinks. 

50 million for chewing gum. 


PESSIMISM 205 


ought to be kept in plain view — facts which are constantly obscured 
by isolated tales of scandal and crime in which the newspapers abound. 
The Optimist League calls attention to the fact that ten thousand bank 
cashiers have done their work faithfully for periods ranging from ten 
to twenty-five years; that twenty million married people in this country 
were not divorced last year; that eighty million citizens have not com- 
mitted suicide; and that every week ten million people make railway 
trips in safety. 


When all is said, there has been for some centuries a rather steady 
growth in the things which we have come to prize — freedom, oppor- 
tunity, security, physical comforts, medical, surgical, and dental serv- 
ice, control of contagious diseases, household conveniences, conven- 
iences of travel and communication, a world-wide news service, the 
passing of fear and superstition, educational facilities for our children, 
constantly increasing rights and privileges of women, and so on 
through the long list. We should not care again to face hunger and 
cold and constant fear, nor should we be willing to sacrifice the security 
which law and order during the longer and longer intervals of peace 
have gained for our women and children and for our lives and property. 
When radical social reformers clamor for the overthrow of our present 
social system and arraign it as a system of slavery and poverty and 
cruel injustice, it is evident that they use these terms relatively, having 
in mind some ideal social order in which all our present freedom and 
security and our comforts and conveniences are to be retained and the 
glaring imperfections removed! ! 


We hear complaints everywhere about the inefficiency of our 
political machinery, our corrupt politicians, our privilege-con- 
trolled legislative bodies, our do-nothing congresses, and the fail- 
ure of justice in our courts; but how much of this censure is due 
again to our idealism in comparing our institutions with what 
they ought to be — not with what they have been. Those who 
feel pessimistically inclined with regard to our political institu- 
tions should read Edward A. Ross’s little book entitled What is 
America? and Chapter XIV of Walter E. Weyl’s book, The 
New Democracy, if they would appreciate somewhat the good 
government that we have. 


A matter of emphasis 
But not all communities areas happy as those I have described. 
1 From the author’s book, The Psychology of Social Reconstruction. 


206 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


It seemed to me worth while to show how emphasis may be laid 
upon the good as well as the bad. In general, we must lay empha- 
sis upon the bad, because only so can the world be made better. 
Complacency will not do. We must see the evil, and see that it 
is evil — and then destroy it and move on to the better. A cer- 
tain newspaper announced in conspicuous headlines that a sani- 
tary survey of a certain large city in the South revealed the fact 
that thirty per cent of the houses were without bathrooms. The 
reader is supposed to receive the news with a kind of shock, the 
implication being that a larger percentage would be expected to 
have them. This is right, and the motive and method were cor- 
rect; but if the motive were not ethical and constructive, but 
merely historical, the headlines might have startled us with the 
announcement that a survey actually showed that seventy per 
cent of the houses in that city were provided with bathrooms. 

Whether we are optimists or pessimists appears to be a matter of 
emphasis. 

Mr. H. G. Wells, in his New Worlds for Old, paints in strong 
colors the sins and evils of the day; yet in the same book he does 
not hesitate to say: 

In spite of all the confusions and thwartings of life, the halts and 
resiliencies and the counter-strokes of fate, it is manifest that in the long 
run, human life becomes broader than it was, gentler than it was, finer 
and deeper. On the whole — and nowadays almost steadily — things 
get better. There is a secular amelioration of life, and it is brought about 
by Good Will working through the efforts of men. 

_ The world is now a better place for a common man thee ever it was 
before, the spectacle wider and richer and deeper and more charged with 
hope and promise. Think of the universal things it is so easy to ignore; 
of the great and growing multitude, for example, of those who may 
travel freely about the world, who may read freely, think freely, speak 
freely! Think of the quite unprecedented numbers of well-ordered 
homes and cared-for, wholesome, questioning children! And it is not 
simply that we have this increasing sea of mediocre well-being in which 
the realities of the future are engendering, but in the matter of sheer 
achievement I believe in my own time. It has been the cry of the irre- 
sponsive man since criticism began, that his own generation produced 
nothing; it’s a cry that I hate and deny. When the dross has been 
cleared away and comparison becomes possible, I am convinced it will 
be admitted that in the aggregate, in philosophy, and significant liter- 


PESSIMISM 207 


ature, in architecture, painting and scientific research, in engineering 
and industrial invention, in state-craft, humanity and valiant deeds, the 
last thirty years of man’s endeavors will bear comparison with any 
other period of thirty years whatever in history. 

And this is the result of effort; things get better because men mean 
them to get better and try to bring betterment about; this progress goes 
on because man, in spite of evil temper, blundering and vanity, in spite 
of indolence and base desire, does also respond to Good Will and dis- 
play Good Will. You may declare that all the good things in life are 
the result of causes over which man has no control, that in pursuit of an 
“enlightened self-interest’’ he makes things better inadvertently. But 
think of any good thing you know! Was it thus it came? } 


Now this “improvement”’ which Mr. Wells speaks of has been 
going on — have you ever thought of it? —for five hundred 
thousand years. When the first man stood upright, sharpened a 
flint, pointed a stick for a spear, invented the bow and arrow, or 
discovered the use of fire, he improved his condition. There were 
better implements, new power, happier conditions of living, as 
well as creative work and the joy of discovery. Carry this on 
down through the ages to our last labor-saving devices, the latest 
discoveries in the hygiene of food, dress, or house construction, or 
the latest perfected implements of agriculture or means of trans- 
portation. There has been constant awmprovement. Now, we 
cannot suppose that the first man was unhappy. His condition 
was certainly “‘better’’ than that of the apes which preceded him, 
and we cannot consider them as unhappy, nor any of the animals 
still lower down in the scale; they are all eager to live, and no 

1H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (copyrighted by The Macmillan Company. 
Reprinted by permission), pp. 5, 10,11. This was written before the Great War. 
For an equally striking account of social progress since the War, see Robert 
Briffault’s The Making of Humanity. 

The fallacy of the good old times deceives few of us now. In the Museum at 
Constantinople the writer was shown an ancient tablet dating from 3800 B.c. 
Translated, it read —‘‘We have fallen upon evil times and the world has waxed 
very old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respect- 
ful to their parents.’’ In an article entitled ‘‘An Answer to Pessimists’’ by 
David F. Houston in Harper’s Magazine for June, 1924, one finds a severe ar- 
raignment of Congress, where the business of the Nation is left undone or is 
badly done, and of the demagogues in public office whose principles hang laxly 
upon them. After the reader has duly read and approved of this, the author 


quietly informs him that it was written by Mr. Justice Story of Massachusetts 
in the year 1818, 


208 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


doubt happy in living. Looking at the matter in this way, there 
does not seem to be much ground for a philosophy of pessimism. 

But we dare not let this evident meliorism blind us to the 
dangers which lie immediately before us. Hope as we may, we 
cannot hide from ourselves the fact that the menace of a coming 
barbarism hangs over Europe to-day — yes, and over America 
too — due to novel conditions arising in part from the Great 
War, in part from circumstances incidental to a transition period 
in moral and religious beliefs and in industrial relations. ‘There 
is, however, nothing in the situation which the people of Europe 
and America have not the power to remedy, zf they will. If they 
fail, the new social order of which so many have the vision and in 
which peace, good-will, and codperation shall prevail, will be 
delayed — but it will come. 


In connection with this chapter read: 

Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany), lecture x11I. 

Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘The Assertion and Denial of the Will,” selection 
from The World as Will and Ideain Rand’s Modern Philosophers (Hough- 
ton Mifflin Company), pp. 658-71. 

William James, ‘“‘Is Life Worth Living?” in The Will to Believe (Long- 
mans, Green and Company). 


Further references: 

John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion (Henry Holt and Company), 
“Nature,” pp. 3-69. 

James Ward, The Realm of Ends (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), lectures xy, 
XVI, XVII. 

R. M. Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism. (William Blackwood and Sons.) 

Josiah Royce, Fugitive Essays (Harvard University Press), “‘The Prac- 
tical Significance of Pessimism,” p. 1383; ‘‘Pessimism and Modern 
Thought,” p. 155. 

Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics. Translated by Frank Thilly 
(Charles Scribner’s Sons), book 11, chaps. III, Iv. 

J. Arthur Thomson, The System of Animate Nature (Henry Holt and Com- 
pany), vol. 11, lecture xvi, ‘‘Disharmonies and Other Shadows.” 

James Sully, Pessimism, a History and a Criticism. (D. Appleton and 
Company.) 

_ Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea (Ticknor and Com- 

pany), vol. 11, chap. xiv, “On the Vanity and Suffering of Life,” 


CHAPTER XII 
THEORIES OF REALITY 


DUALISM 


The “ stuff” of the world 

From the earliest times philosophers have been interested, not 
merely in the course of events, in the study of growth and evolu- 
tion and in the origin and destiny of the world, but also in the stuff 
out of which the world is made. This problem we must now 
study. We have been pondering on the questions, What is the 
world made for? and, By whom was it made? Now we must ask, 
What is it made of? Theories of Reality, therefore, now con- 
front us; ontological theories, as we call them. 

It was this problem of reality, as we have seen, that engaged 
the attention of the earliest Greek philosophers. Thales of 
Miletus who lived in the sixth century before Christ and who is 
called the father of philosophy, said that all things came from 
water; but his successors in the Ionian school thought that they 
came from air or fire. Rapidly the early Greeks advanced be- 
yond these crude conceptions and soon arrived at the theory 
that the world is made of atoms, or little material particles. 


The three theories 

It is obvious that if we are to speak of ultimate forms of reality 
at all, and if we are to believe that the world may be reduced to 
certain elementary substances or elementary forms of being, 
either there must be one such elementary substance, or two, or 
more than two. So we have the three philosophical theories of 
reality — Monism, Dualism, and Pluralism. The tendency to 
seek for unity in plurality, to find the One in the Many, as Plato 
said, is persistent in the human mind, so that there has always 
been a strong hope among philosophers of finding some one ele- 
‘mentary form of being — or, at any rate, two — the various 
manifestations of which shall make up our world of experience. 


210 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Consequently, monistic and dualistic systems of philosophy 
have been very popular. Just at present there seems to be less 
interest in trying to find out what the world is made of and more 
interest in discovering its meaning and value. Problems of life, 
problems of evolution, problems of experience, problems of 
value, have now somewhat eclipsed the older problem of ‘‘on- 
tology.” 

But still these problems of reality are of perennial interest, and 
before we go on to the larger questions we must consider these. 
We must mention the different forms of Monism, and under- 
stand clearly what Dualism means, and examine the newer plu- 
ralistic views. 


Dualism 
Of these three theories of reality, perhaps the easiest one to un- 


derstand is Dualism. Let us therefore begin with this. Prob- 


ably the reason that this is most easily understood is because it is 


the popular belief, at any rate in America, where our philosophi- 


mem erwrove 


cal traditions inherited from the Scottish school encourage this 
world view. Dualism is the theory that mind and matter are the 
two fundamental realities in the world and that they cannot be 
reduced the one to the other.1. Among primitive people, as well 
as among moderns, it seems very natural to distinguish mind 
from body in so sharp a manner as to make ultimate realities of 
each. Primitive man rarely failed to distinguish soul and body; 
the soul, though not perhaps immaterial, was a kind of duplicate 
of the body, or a shadowy image of it, and could leave it and 
might haunt the grave after death. 

Even Thales and his fellow Ionians, although they seem to 
have been Monists, reducing reality to water or air or fire, still 
believed apparently that these material things were infused with 
life or with a divine and animate principle which made change 


1 The word dualism is ambiguous, being used in philosophy in two senses. It 
has sometimes been used to designate the belief in a good and a bad principle, 
which lie at the root of all things. For instance, in the religion of Persia, Ahri- 
man and Ahura-Mazda (Ormazd) stand for two eternal principles of evil and 
good. In this sense there is a dualism in Plato, for he taught that Being and 
Non-Being are two primordial principles, the latter being the source of imper- 
fection. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — DUALISM 211 


and growth possible. Empedocles, in counting fire;;water, earth, 
and air as the roots of all things, still thought he fnust add two 
others of a more mental or spiritual character, namely, love and 
hate, the latter serving as moving causes. And Andxagoras pos- 
tulated besides the world of atoms something which he called 
Nous (Nods), or Mind, an eternal reality coexisting with the 
other elements. Medizval philosophy was likewise dualistic, 
following Saint Augustine, who considered man as the union 
of body and soul, the soul being an immaterial and immortal 
substance. 


Metaphysical Dualism 

_ The powerful dualistic current in modern thought, extending 
even to our firesides, took its rise in the philosophy of Descartes, 
who is called the founder of modern philosophy and whose Medt- 
tations, published in French and in Latin at the middle of the 
seventeenth century, have exerted an untold influence on our 
modern ways of thinking. Descartes’ teaching was that there 
are in the world two wholly different kinds of reality, or ‘‘sub- 
stances,” as he called them, thought and extension, or, as we 
should say, mind and matter. The whole physical world, includ- 
ing the bodies of animals and men, is extended substance — 
matter, as we call it, or mass, governed absolutely by mechan- 
ical laws. Matter in motion constitutes the physical world. 
The lower animals are just mechanisms. An animal has no soul; 
he is only a material body. Not so man, for within his material 
extended body there is a thinking substance, the immortal soul, 
whose very being is to think. 

This hard-and-fast metaphysical Dualism, as taught by Des- 
cartes, has at the present time few representatives in philosophy. 
We are not so fond of using the word ‘‘substance”’ now, either in 
referring to material or mental things. In the physical world we 
speak of energies and in the mental world of processes. And we 
are always searching for some principle of unity or of continuity 
or of evolution, so that the assumption of two elementary, wholly 
distinct, and mutually exclusive kinds of reality is less welcome. 
To modern philosophy it seems a little too dogmatic also to make 


212 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


such wide generalizations, or to parcel out the Universe in this 
way into two exclusive regions. We are always trying to over- 
come this Dualism and find one rather than two ultimate forms 
of being; or else as is now still more congenial, to recognize at 
once an ultimate diversity in the world and a plurality of en- 
tities. Consequently, although Dualism is not without its able 
advocates at the present time, either monistic or pluralistic 
world views are more common. 


Psycho-physical Dualism 

But while the old metaphysical Dualism is now less empha- 
sized, nothing prevents us from accepting a psycho-physical 
Dualism, which in human personality distinguishes very sharply 
the mind or spirit from the body. A powerful array of argu- 
ments may be brought forward in support of this ‘‘soul theory,” 
and of the essential and fundamental difference between soul 
and body. A most able modern defender of this psycho-physical 
Dualism is found in William McDougall, whose book, entitled 
Body and Mind; A Defence of Animism, is passing through many 
editions. According to McDougall the soul exists as an inde- 
pendent form of being and interacts with the body. This view 
‘is sometimes called Interactionism. It is sharply opposed to 
Materialism, which affirms that the body alone is real and that 
the mind is only a function of the brain, or at the most a power- 
less accompaniment of cerebral activity. 

Indeed, it seems most obvious and natural that mind and body 
are not only both real, but that they are wholly unique and never 
to be confounded. ‘Two different sets of terms are needed to — 
describe them. Matter is an extensive magnitude, filling space, 
having length, breadth, and thickness. It has weight and inertia 
and is moved by extrinsic, mechanical forces. We cannot think 
of any of these qualities as belonging to mind, which seems to — 
have no spacial relations — only relations of time. Mind is char- — 
acterized by a peculiar form of unity called personality, and a 
unique power of memory. It is spontaneous, self-determining, 
purposive, works toward ends, has interests, appreciates and — 
realizes values, is creative. 





THEORIES OF REALITY — DUALISM 213 


Thus there seems to be no point of contact between mind, en- 
dowed with such powers as spontaneity, appreciation, construc- 
tive imagination, memory, and personality, on the one hand, and 
body, which we think of as a mere grouping of mass particles in 
space, on the other. Indeed, it seems sometimes as if the body 
were a sort of drag upon the mind, obstructing its operations, 
halting its flights. It is little wonder, therefore, that many phi- 
losophers have thought of the human spirit as belonging to a 
noumenal realm — that is, a world of absolute reality where 
freedom and spontaneity reign — while the physical world is 
phenomenal, where strict relations of cause and effect prevail. 

_- Now this psycho-physical Dualism, which insists upon the 

unique character both of mind and of body, does not necessarily 
lead to a metaphysical Dualism, which affirms that in the world 
at large, or from the beginning, there are two ultimate and irre- 
ducible forms of reality, like mind and matter. It would, of 
course, be consistent with such a view, but it might be explained 
in other ways. What we call the body, appearing to us under 
the form of externality and exhibiting certain uniform methods 
of behavior which we call physical laws, may be made up of units 
which are not themselves like anything we call matter. Or mind 
and body, having the opposite characters which they do, may be 
two modes or manifestations of some third kind of reality, some 
basal cosmic stuff, the nature of which science may sometime 
reveal. 


Interaction 

If we insist on taking our stand on a hard-and-fast Dualism, 
we are confronted with the difficult problem of explaining the in- 
teraction of mind and matter. In the human personality it pre- 
sents itself as the problem of the interaction of mind and body. 
How can two things having nothing in common influence each 
other, act on each other? It may, of course, be said that the 
problem of the interaction of two physical things, two billiard 
balls, two molecules or atoms, is quite as much unsolved. Mys- 
tery and insuperable difficulties confront us as soon as we try to 
explain how a billiard ball imparts its motion, or imparts motion, 


214 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


to another ball,! so that we need not be too much worried by the 
difficulty of interaction between mind and body. The stock ob- 
jection to such action arises from the law of conservation of en- 
ergy, which tells us that the sum of energies in a closed system re- 
mains constant. Now, physical bodies are postulated as forming 
such a closed system, and if the body effects changes in the 
mind, or the mind causes motion in the body, we should seem to 
lose energy from the physical system in the former case, and in- 
troduce energy into the physical system from the mental in the 
other, a situation quite abhorrent to our scientific views. Scien- 
tists revolt against the notion of a mental world sending energies 
over into the compact and self-inclusive physical system. Phys- 
ical energies change their form, appearing now as heat, light, or 
electricity; but they are all accounted for in the physical system 
and no new ones come over from a mental region. 

Put in this way the objection to a dualism of mind and body 
seems conclusive. Possibly it 7s conclusive against the old view of 
mind and body as being parallel or correlated processes, but if we 
think of mind as a new kind of power achieved by the organiza- 
tion of bodily processes, mind and body may be fully distin- 
guished and yet the law of conservation of energy in no wise 
violated. The subject of the relation of mind and body will be 
discussed in a later chapter. Here it is enough to say that the 
fact of the influence of the mind upon the body and the body 
upon the mind is obvious enough in our daily experience. Also 
clearly evident is the fact of the dynamic character of the mind. 
The mind does things, not only to the body, but to the world. 
It makes history, organizes science, creates art. The law of 
conservation of energy, on the other hand, is, like any other 
law, nothing but the generalization of a certain amount of ex- 
perience, a useful formula, under which to introduce order into 
our descriptive treatment of phenomena. It is probable that 
a more complete knowledge of the mind-body problem would > 
show us that there is nothing here in conflict with the law in 
question. But if there were, if the dynamic and effective 
character of mind were inconsistent with the law, the validity 


1 See Lotze’s Microcosmus, book 1, chap. 11. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — DUALISM 215 


of the law itself would have to be reéxamined. Indeed, J. 
Arthur Thomson says of the law of conservation of energy 
that ‘it is rather a pious opinion than an established fact.’’ 4 


Conclusion 

What, then, in conclusion, are we to say of Dualism? I think 
we may say this: A mere psycho-physical Dualism, which insists 
that mental processes are not physical processes and that physi- 
cal processes are not mental phenomena, would seem to be inno- 
cent enough. But as for metaphysical Dualism, which proposes 
to extend this dual conception to the whole world and insists 
that the Universe must allow itself to be harnessed up in a span 
like this, it would become increasingly difficult ta defend. In 
particular, if one should say that there are two things in the Uni- 
verse and two only, mind and matter, the statement would have 
little weight or meaning until we had subjected these two con- 
cepts to careful analysis. 

While this older metaphysical Dualism of mind and matter ap- 
pears to be somewhat outgrown, there is another kind of Dual- 
ism, which seems to lie very deep in the world movement. It is 
the kind which lurks in the philosophy of Plato and appears again 
in that of Bergson. The thought ever recurs to us that there is 
something which obstructs the action of mind in the world. Plato 
called it Non-Being, which has been identified with matter. In 
the religion of Zoroaster, it was Ahriman, the genius of evil. 
Physicists have not yet quite solved the antithesis between en- 
ergy and matter. It is difficult to formulate a definition of en- 
ergy which does not still involve something like matter. Or, if 
both be reduced to Space and Time, the Dualism persists. Pro- 
gress seems to come through the overcoming of resistance. Evil 
has not yet been reduced to merely a stage of the good. Perhaps 
there is, after all, some fundamental dualism in things, which we 
cannot yet state in any definite terms. 

But the old ontological Dualism seems now to be less satisfac- 
tory; and equally unsatisfactory isan ontological Monism. FPer- 
haps it is better to treat Reality genetically, as a process, or devel- 

1 The System of Animate Nature, vol. 1, p. 244. 


216 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


opment, as a series of events rather than a grouping of fixed and 
imperishable elements. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Oswald Kuelpe, Introduction to Philosophy (The Macmillan Company), 
pp. 133-38. 
John Grier Hibben, The Problems of Philosophy (Charles Scribner’s Sons), 
chap. II. 
William McDougall, Body and Mind; A History and a Defence of Ani- 
mism (Methuen and Company), chaps. xIII, XIV, XXVI. 


Further references: 

R. W. Sellars, The Essentials of Philosophy (The Macmillan Company), 
chap. XvI. 

Wilhelm Windelband, An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by 
Joseph McCabe (Henry Holt and Company), pp. 116-20. 

William McDougall, Outline of Psychology (Charles Scribner’s Sons), 
chap. I. 

Joseph Alexander Leighton, Man and the Cosmos (D. Appleton and Com- 
pany), chap. xxv, ‘‘ Mind and Body.” 

Henry Sidgwick, Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind. (George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.) 


ee a a 


——- 


4 
| 
i 





CHAPTER XIII 
THEORIES OF REALITY 


1 MATERIALISM 


*“**'There’s machinery in the butterfly, 
There’s a mainspring to the bee. 
There’s hydraulics to a daisy 
And contraptions to a tree. 


***Tf we could see the birdie 
That makes the chirping sound 
With psycho-analytic eyes, 
With X-ray, scientific eyes, 
We could see the wheels go round.’ 


** And I hope all men 
Who think like this 
Will soon lie underground.” 
VACHEL LINDSAY 


Monism 

MATERIALISM, as we have seen, is a form of Monism. Mon- 
ism asserts that the world is in some way unitary; that it has a 
oneness of some kind, either of substance or of structure. Mod- 
ern Monism emphasizes the structural or organic unity of the 
world, its wholeness, order, plan, or completeness; the world is, 
at any rate, some kind of unitary whole. The older form of Mon- 
ism sought for the desired unity in some single substance, such as 
matter or mind. If the whole world is explained as merely a re- 
distribution of matter, we should have Materialistic Monism or 
Materialism. If itis a redistribution of energy, we might have a 
kind of Dynamic Monism, or Dynamism. If the world is essen- 
tially spirit or mind, what we call matter being a mere manifesta- 
tion or externalization of mind, then we should have Spiritualis- 
tic Monism, or Spiritualism, or Idealism. It will be necessary to 
explain these several views of reality more in detail. 


Materialistic Monism 
We may begin with Materialism. In its simplest form this 
theory affirms that there is nothing in the world except matter; 


1Vachel Lindsay. The Golden Whales of California. (Copyrighted by the 
Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission.) 


218 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


that all objects of experience are composed of matter; that mind 
is either a form of matter, or a function or property of it. Mate- 
rialists believe that the world is primarily a physical process, and 
that what we call mind is, so to speak, an incident in the process, 
a late product of organized matter as the latter appears in the 
brain of the higher animals. 


Atomism 

The word atom has a more definite meaning than the word mat- 
ter, so that the term Atomism has sometimes been used instead of 
Materialism. Atomism was the view of Democritus and his as- 
sociates in ancient Greece, their theory being that atoms and 
empty space are the only assumptions necessary to explain the 
world. The atoms, however, are in eternal motion, so that we 
seem to have not one basal concept, as Monism requires, but 
three —- atoms, space, and motion. 


Naturalism 

Owing to the indefiniteness attaching to the word ‘‘matter,” 
Materialism as a solution of the problem of reality is less in vogue 
now and its place has been taken by the theory known as “‘ Nat- 
uralism.”” The older Materialism was very dogmatic. It felt 
quite sure that the whole world, including life and mind and hu- 
man society and art and literature and human history, could be 
explained as the result of the redistribution of matter and mo- 
tion, or of atoms moving in empty space —— granting only suffi- 
cient time and the law of evolution and adaptation. It was par- 
ticularly averse to assuming any creative force exterior to the 
movement of matter, any directive agency in the process, any 
vital principle or life force differing from mechanical forces, 
any entity such as mind, or any purpose, end, or value except 
in human affairs. 

The new Naturalism differs little from the above, except that 
it places less emphasis upon matter as the substantial ground of 
the world and more upon the strictly mechanical character of the 
world process. It is less dogmatic about the substance out of 
which the world has evolved or is made, and, if it uses the term 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM 219 


maiter at all, it is in connection with such terms as force or energy 
or electricity. In general, Naturalism places emphasis upon the 
physical sciences, especially upon physics and chemistry; and it 
is often inclined to think that the laws of these sciences are suffi- 
cient to explain the world even in its most evolved forms, such as 
organic life and mind and human history and human institu- 
tions. It places great emphasis upon the law of conservation of 
energy, and regards the world as a redistribution of energy, or of 
matter, or of both, and it relies profoundly upon the principle of 
evolution and adaptation as explaining the survival of structures 
and functions fitted to survive. 

Thus, in its extreme form Naturalism differs little from Ma- 
terialism, only stressing the concept of matter less and that of en- 
ergy more. But Naturalism is a vague term and is often applied 
to the view known as Positivism, which, as we have already seen, 
refuses to carry philosophy at all beyond the results of the nat- 
ural sciences. Naturalism in this sense does not become any part 
of philosophy, being merely the denial of the possibility of philos- 
ophy. On the other hand, the term Naturalism has recently 
been used in a new and liberal sense to denote an explanation of 
the world based, not on physics and chemistry alone, but on all 
the sciences, thus recognizing that the biological and mental 
sciences have certain distinctive characteristics due to novel- 
ties in their subject-matter, and recognizing also the validity of 
the theory of levels in evolution.! 

If one could go still further and recognize the claims of logic 
and mathematics among the ‘‘natural’’ sciences, there would 
surely be no objection to the term Naturalism; but, on the other 
hand, the term would cease to have any definite meaning. If 
Naturalism means that philosophy should be based on the results 
of all the sciences, and that nothing but scientific methods are to 
be used in philosophy, many would welcome such a Naturalism. 
But ‘‘scientific methods”’ here would not mean merely the meth- 
ods used in the physical sciences. In general, the term Natural- 
ism is objectionable just as the term supernatural is objection- 
able; in both cases we have to define what we mean by nature. 


1 Compare R. W. Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism, 


220 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


The materialistic world view 

In this chapter, then, we shall use the term Materialism rather 
than Naturalism; and if we use the latter term it will be under- 
stood in its generally accepted meaning, referring toa mechanistic 
or physico-chemical interpretation of the world. 

Such a materialistic or mechanistic world view has appealed to 
many minds, owing to its simplicity and owing to its apparently 
close connection with the physical sciences, whose exact char- 
acter has won for them our almost reverent respect. The pic- 
ture of the world which it gives us is simple and attractive. One 
has only to think of infinite space, in which mass particles are in 
eternal motion. It is just the possible groupings or constella- 
tions, infinite in number, of these mass particles or atoms which 
constitute the objects of our experience — rocks and sea and air 
and animal bodies. The cooling surface of the once fiery Earth 
made possible finally those very complex carbon compounds 
called colloids, from which it was but a step to the colloids which 
we find in plants and animal bodies and to the simple cell, the 
unit of all life. Evolution shows us the method by which the sim- 
plest living cell may develop through chance variation and nat- 
ural selection into the more and more complex bodies of plants 
and animals, until man himself appears with a highly differenti- 
ated nervous system capable of thought, feeling, and volition. | 

If the ancient Greeks found an atomistic and mechanistic pic- 
ture of the world attractive, we can understand the powerful ap- 
peal which it makes in modern times when strengthened by Dar- 
win’s remarkable discoveries relating to the origin of species. 
The view commends itself by its simplicity, by the relatively 
small number of concepts which it must assume, and by the ab- 
sence of troublesome problems of creation, of ends and purposes 
and final causes, and of vital and spiritual forces. 


Historical 

Historically this world view was held by the Greek atomists 
and by the Epicurean school, including the Roman poet Lucre- 
tius, whose great poem, De Rerum Natura, pictures in glowing 
hexameters the terrors of religion, and the freedom and emanci- 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM 221 


pation from fear gained to men in the knowledge that the whole 
Universe is nothing more than a monstrous grouping of harmless 
atoms, which were at first falling through infinite space. 

In modern times a materialistic world view was advocated by 
the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth 
century. In the following century, preceding the Revolution in 
France, Materialism was vigorously advocated by a school of 
writers of whom Diderot, Lamettrie, and d’Holbach were repre- 
sentatives. In Germany in the nineteenth century, after the 
downfall of the Hegelian philosophy, there was a vigorous school 
of Materialists, of whom the better known are Moleschott, Vogt, 
and Ernst Haeckel. 


Ernst Haeckel 

_ Haeckel wrote a little book called The Riddle of the Universe, 
which presented in popular form under the name of Monism the 
philosophy of Naturalism, strengthened by the Darwinian the- 
ory of evolution, at that time new in Germany. Although this 
widely read book contained a good deal of pseudo-science and in- 
troduced into philosophy what we may call a false simplicity, it 
purported to be the solution of the world problem which the 
much-exalted “‘science” of the nineteenth century sponsored. 
Science speaks and the world problem is solved. Haeckel wrote 
oracularly of a “law of substance,”’ which is the conservation of 
matter and of energy; of infinite Time and of infinite Space filled 
with the imponderable ‘‘ether’”’ and the ponderable atoms; of the 
spontaneous generation of life from inorganic matter; of a certain 
_ kind of protoplasm called psychoplasm, which is the seat of con- 
scious mind. 

Allof this, coupled with the new Darwinian theory of evolution, 
impressed a wide circle of readers and did much to popularize the 
materialistic philosophy of a little circle of German writers in the 
middle of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, too, the book 
included a bitter attack upon current religious conceptions, giv- 
ing the untrained reader the thought that science and evolution 
are incompatible with religion, thus aggravating the ancient but 
unnecessary conflict between religion and science. 


222 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


A careful reading of this book of Haeckel’s is illuminating, es- 
pecially if read in connection with Sir Oliver Lodge’s book en- 
titled Life and Matter, and with the account of Haeckel in Edwin 
E. Slosson’s Major Prophets of To-Day. One soon makes several 
interesting discoveries. For instance, the author says that “the 
two fundamental forms of substance, ponderable matter and 
ether, are not dead and only moved by extrinsic force, but they 
are endowed with sensation and will (though naturally of the 
lowest grade); they experience an inclination for condensation, 
a dislike of strain, they strive after the one and struggle against 
the other.” + 

This is even something more than the Hylozoism of the early 
Greek philosophers, which attributed life to all things; for 
Haeckel says that the original ‘‘substance” is “endowed” with 
a whole string of psychic qualities, namely, sensation, will, expe- 
rience, inclination, dislike, strife, and struggle. Haeckel himself 
interprets this after the manner of Spinoza. Indeed, he calls 
himself not a Materialist, but a Monist of the type of Spinoza. 
But Haeckel’s philosophy is hardly that of Spinoza, since he 
gives the psychic part of substance a sort of creative function, 
saying that feeling and inclination are “the active causes” of 
the original primary division of substance into mass and ether.? 
This seems, indeed, rather a system of Hylozoism than a system 
of Idealism, having its roots in a kind of profound Dualism, 
although Haeckel thought it was the strictest Monism. The 
materialistic aspect of his system appears, of course, in his 
theory of mind; that is, the human and animal mind, which 
he finds to be a function of the brain. 


Materialism in the twentieth century 

In the present century Materialism in the older sense has few 
representatives. It has given way to the theory of Mechanism, 
or to that of Naturalism in the limited sense which we have de- 
fined. Assuch it has many able advocates, perhaps not so much 
in the distinct field of philosophy as among men of science who 


1 Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, p. 220. 
2 Loc. cit., p. 248. 


—— — | a 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM = 223 


have ventured into this field. Even here, however, the interest 
is not so much in the interpretation of the world in mechanistic 
terms, as in extending the application of physical and chemical 
concepts to the explanation of organic life and the human mind. 
The former tendency will be found prominent, for instance, 
in Jacques Loeb’s The Mechanistic Conception of Infe, and the 
latter in Dr. G. W. Crile’s Man — An Adaptive Mechanism. 
The mechanistic conception of life we have discussed in a pre- 
vious chapter, and the philosophy of mind will be examined in 
a chapter to follow. 

The old antithesis between Materialism and Spiritualism 
seems to be losing its significance. Genetic and evolutionary 
concepts are taking the place of the older ideas of substance and 
matter. The new discoveries in radio-activity have changed al- 
most overnight our whole conception of matter, so that the term 
“Materialism”? would now have little meaning. And many 
other concepts formerly used in materialistic writings are under- 
going such changes of meaning that they are no longer adequate 
to serve as a foundation for a system of philosophy. Even Her- 
bert Spencer, although he said in his ambitious Synthetic Philoso- 
phy that the whole world could be explained as a redistribution 
of Matter, Motion, and Force, yet acknowledged that these are 
only symbols, modes of the Unknowable. 


Difficulties 

What, then, are the real difficulties with that theory of the 
world which we call Materialism? There is one class of difficul- 
ties constantly urged against it which do not seem to me to have 
great weight. These are epistemological objections. A great 
deal was formerly made of these. It was said that apart from 
mind none of the so-called realities that Materialism puts in the 
first place has any existence. Matter is an abstraction of ab- 
stractions. Only individual things exist, like ‘‘this typewriter”’ 
or ‘‘this pen.” “Typewriter” and ‘‘pen”’ are general terms, or 
abstractions, existing only in the mind, and ‘‘matter”’ is a still 
more general term, being merely a name which summarizes a few 
qualities belonging to all objects of perception. And even indi- 


224 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


vidual things, like ‘‘this typewriter” or “this pen,” have no exist- 
ence independent of the perceiving mind, being at the best 
merely a grouping of sensations. And if, instead of matter, we 
wish to speak of atoms or electrons, the case is no better. They 
are creations of the mind, models or pictures which the mind cre- 
ates in its attempt to explain the objects of sense. And again the 
case is no better, if in place of matter, or atoms or electrons, we 
substitute the word force or energy. We have no direct know- 
ledge of force. We see things move and we think the motion 
needs a cause, and so we assume a force to serve as the cause of 
motion. Wesee work done and so we assume energy as the cause 
or ground of the work. 

Or, again, if we mean by matter some ground or substratum or 
substance, since the actual qualities which we see and feel seem 
to need some ‘‘substance”’ in which they “‘inhere,” it is replied 
that all these are nothing but words. We have no experience of 
any such substratum, and no reason to believe that anything real 
corresponds to these words. 

These objections, so often urged against Materialism, are per- 
haps hard to answer, but they produce little conviction. The 
atom, which we picture to-day as an energy-system of electric 
charges, may be just a model making picturable the outer causes 
of our sensations, and the model may be changed by the next 
generation of scientists, but the conviction remains that some 
model is the true one and that atoms are realities. Indeed, such 
a knowledge of the atom is being gained to-day that we may say 
it is getting past the picturable model stage and is becoming a 
reality. I believe that there is a growing tendency now to accept 
the work of science at its face value, and to trust the picture of 
the world as presented by science as in the main a true picture of 
the objective world as it is, independent of the perceiving mind. 
It is easy to show that mountains, trees, and plains are mental 
constructs, but nevertheless mountains, trees, and plains existed 
before ever eye of man beheld them. 

Therefore, let us say that molecules, atoms, and electrons are 
real, real and objective entities; that matter is real and energy is 
real. They are real, but not necessarily ultimate. They again 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM 225 


may be resolved into something more primordial still, and, fur- 
thermore, they are not the only realities. —The weakness of Mate- 
rialism is found inits absurd claim, characteristic of the older Ma- 
terialism, that matter or atoms or mass particles or mass parti- 
cles in motion are the only realities. They are real, but so are 
many other things, such as space and time and energy and organ- 
ization and creative synthesis and evolution and heredity and life 
and mind and values and logical and rational principles. 

When a class of young people, students of philosophy, are first 
presented with the profound question, What is Reality? I have ° 
usually found that they are not very much interested in Materi- 
alism as an answer to the problem, because such things as matter . 
and atoms and force do not appear to them to be the real things 
in the world. Life is much more real, and so are love and desire 
and longing and poetry and friends and society and work and 
play and beauty. Just what do we mean by the word reality, 
when we say that matter and atoms are more real than these 
other things? Browning’s line 


Sun-treader, I believe in God and truth 
And love; 


meets with more response than the legend of the Materialist, who 
says: ‘I believe in mass particles in motion.”” Why not say 
that the interesting things in life are the real things? What 
warrant have we for believing that a process of analysis gets 
us down nearer to realities? Why may it not be that a process 
of synthesis gets us wp nearer to realities? 

To which, no doubt, the Materialist would answer: ‘‘I do not 
care to follow you into that region of thought. I supposed you 
were trying to find out what the elementary things of the world 
are, its material, its substance.’’ Well, we were trying to find 
out what the realities of the world are, and of course the process 
of analysis which carries us down to elements is also interesting; 
but the electron theory has shown us that atoms are not ultimate 
elements and there is no reason to think that the electrons are ul- 
timate. So far as we go in our analysis we shall find form and or- 
ganization just as ultimate as the elements, and perhaps far more 


226 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


significant. If atoms are organized into molecules and cells, and 
these into living bodies which live and love, why is not the organi- 
zation itself, and the organizing power or agency, as fundamental 
as the atoms, and as significant — or more fundamental and 
more significant? 

We can understand, therefore, why the great philosophers of — 
history have, for the most part, not been Materialists. Plato 
found ideas more real than atoms. Aristotle thought that form — 
was as primordial as matter, and indeed more so, since God is 
pure form. Saint Augustine believed God to be more real than 
matter, and indeed to have made matter. Leibniz thought that 
the world is reducible to a great society of Monads, which are not 
material but spiritual. Berkeley believed that nothing is real ex- 
cept minds. Kant taught that duty and good-will belong to the 
noumenal or ultra-real world, while matter is only phenomenal. 
Hegel believed that reality is found in a process of development, 
by which the Absolute Reason or Thought eventually attained to 
the goal of art, religion, and philosophy. Schopenhauer said that 
reality is found in Absolute Will, while many modern thinkers 
have taught that there is nothing more real or more ultimate 
than Self or Personality. 


After all the debate and with all the new matters for the intellect to 
weigh, it is doubtful if the soul has lost anything of its interest to the 
imagination. Some of the old abstractions about it have, to be sure, 
lost their significance. It is no longer viewed as a mysterious visitor in 
the body whose real home is elsewhere, nor is it longer considered as 
wholly of the emotions and intuitions and somehow removed from mind 
and intelligence. Body, mind, and soul appear more than ever irre- 
trievably bound together, yet those things which respond neither to the 
mechanics of matter nor to the laws of reason are still chief among 
human values and most appealing to literature. Soul, self, mind, char- 
acter, personality, by whatever name it is called, still continues to 
inspire the creative imagination both of those who extol and those who 
belittle its power. The spiritual life of the individual, or the nation, or 
the race comes more and more to demand the services of literature. 
Its priesthood may include idealist and materialist, optimist and pessi- 
mist, so long as they are worshippers of the spirit in its manifestations 
of love, sacrifice, magnanimity, kindness, honesty, and faith. 


1 Ashley H. Thorndike, Literature in a Changing Age (copyrighted by The 
Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission), p. 188. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM = 227 


In the remaining pages of this chapter we shall go on to exam- 
ine what the actual physical foundations of the Universe are — 
what this ‘‘matter’’ is which figures so prominently in materialis- 
tic philosophy. But after all, I suppose that-the true way out of 
the materialistic swamp, if swamp it be, is the path indicated in 
the passage just quoted from Thorndike. It isn’t so much a 
question of the stuff out of which the world is made as it is of the 
realities in the world. And the answer to this fateful question 
must be sought, not merely in science, but in literature, art, reli- 
gion, and in daily life; and I think that the real things are not 
alone matter nor atoms nor molecules nor electrons — but life 
and soul and personality and love and sacrifice. 


What is matter ? 
’ Before we leave the subject of Materialism, there is one other 
path of inquiry that should be followed. Suppose for the sake of 
the argument we make the hypothesis that there is nothing in 
the Universe except mass particles in motion, and no ultimate 
laws except those of mechanics, and no world process except a 
process of evolution, by which only those chance groupings of ele- 
ments survive that are best adapted to survive. It then becomes 
exceedingly interesting and important to examine these mass par- 
ticles and inquire into their substance, their structure, and their 
potencies. If there is nothing in the Universe except these mass 
particles, perhaps in the end we should find that to account for 
the world of order, beauty, and reason, together with mind 
which can appreciate the order, beauty, and reason, we should 
have to read back into those mass particles vastly more than the 
term ‘‘mass particle’? means in physical science. 

However, let us pass this difficulty and inquire into the struc- 
ture of the atom. We may glance first at the history of the atom, 
full of interest to the student of philosophy. 


The atomic theory 

Democritus, who first developed the theory of atoms, gives us a 
picture of the atom as it was conceived by the ancients. It was 
a minute body, invisible, indivisible, solid, uncreated, and inde- 


228 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


structible. It had a certain size andshape. Allatoms were alike 
in quality or substance, differing only in shape and size. The 
Greek atomists seemed to think that atoms were indivisible be- 
cause they were solid. Of course, having size or extension in 
space, and a homogeneous substance, they were not indivisible 
in theory. If any one believed in such atoms now, he would 
have to ask what they were made of, thus raising the original 
problem — and he would wish also to know what is meant by ab- 
solute solidity. These little particles were supposed to be in eter- 
nal motion and it was the collision and impact of these particles 
which gave rise to the objects of our experience. 

Perhaps it was the difficulty of conceiving how a complex and 
growing world could arise from the mere mechanical impact of 
atoms in motion that led Lucretius, while adopting the material- 
istic philosophy, to give to the atoms at the start a kind of spon- 
taneity or freedom resembling the freedom of action possessed by 
man.! No doubt it was the same reason which impelled Haeckel, 
as we have seen above, to endow his primitive atoms with psy- 
chic qualities, such as sensation and will. 

In modern times a very different kind of Atomism was pro- 
posed by the philosopher and mathematician, Leibniz (1646— 
1716). The ultimate units of reality he called Monads. These 
Monads are not extended material things, but forces or force- 
centers, and they are of a spiritual or mental character, rather 
than material. What we call a material body is a grouping or 
organization of Monads. 

In the science of the present day, the atom, like the Monad of 
Leibniz, is no longer a ‘‘body,”’ a solid, extended, material thing. 
In chemistry it is, rather, the hypothetical unit whose organic 
union with other atoms enables us to explain objects of sense ex- 
perience. In physics it is a complex structure of smaller units. 
Lord Kelvin pictured the atom as a vortex-ring in the ether, hay- 
ing the peculiar form and motion of a smoke ring blown from the 
smoker’s mouth. This theory has now been abandoned, and, 
through the labors of a brilliant group of scientists,? we have 

1 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, book m, 277-93. 


2 Especially Sir William Crookes, Lenard, Réntgen, Becquerel, Professorand 


Mme. Curie, Sir J. J. Thomson, Sir Ernest Rutherford, Sir W. Ramsay, and 
Soddy, Bohr, Sommerfeld, Milliken and Page. 


a 


i a A 





THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM 229 


now come apparently to a real, if partial, knowledge of the struc- 
ture of the atom. At any rate, of all the brilliant triumphs of 
nineteenth-and twentieth-century science, these researches into 
the electrical nature of the atom are the most startling. . 

We have been accustomed to think that the eighty-odd ele- 
ments, such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, copper, gold, silver, 
and lead, were the foundation stones of the physical world. ‘The 
spectroscope reveals the presence of these same ‘‘eternal’’ ele- 
ments in the Sun and distant stars. We thought the Universe 
was made of them. And we supposed that they were fixed and 
indestructible, and we had long been accustomed to make merry 
over the search of the alchemists for the philosopher’s stone for 
transmuting other cheaper metals into gold. 

- But now, behold, some of the elements, such as radium and 
uranium, are disintegrating right before our eyes. They emit 
strange “‘rays,’’ some of them possessing wonderful photographic 
powers, putting to shame the photography of ordinary light, 
since these rays cheerfully pass through a foot of iron, and make 
nothing of penetrating the human body to photograph our bones. 
Some of them are atoms of helium gas, hurled from the element 
at the rate of twelve thousand miles a second. Others — the 
really interesting ones — are the now famous electrons. They, 
too, are being hurled from the element at the amazing velocity of 
more than one hundred thousand milesa second. Itwassoon dis- 
covered that the atoms, in giving up the electrons, are parting 
with their very ‘‘substance,” and yet the electron is not exactly 
asubstance. It is a charge of electricity, a disembodied charge 
of negative electricity. It would thus appear that substances 
are not made of substance, nor material things of matter. 

It is now believed that the atom is a “structure,” or a kind of 
energy-system, composed of positive and negative charges of 
electricity, having a minute core of positive electricity, about 
which revolve the electrons or the negative charges. Some 
atoms, like those of hydrogen and helium, very light gases, have 
only one or two electrons; other heavier ones, like gold, have 
more; while uranium is supposed to have ninety-two. It ap- 
pears that the atom is a structure somewhat like our solar system 


230 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


in its plan, the tiny core of protons and electrons corresponding to 
our Sun and the electrons to our planets, the distance of the elec- 
trons apart being, relative to their size, as great as that of the 
stars in the heavens. In other words, the atom, like the starry 
universe, is veryempty. As for the size of the electrons and their 
mass — for they have mass, and it is interesting to see how mass 
is coming to be merely a function of velocity — it is only 1/1840 
of a hydrogenatom. If an atom were magnified to the size of a 
church, then an electron in it would be hardly larger than the 
period at the end of this sentence. And the atoms themselves 
are small enough, there being about 54,000,000 ,000,000,000,000 
of them in a cubic centimeter of hydrogen gas. The diameter 
of a hydrogen atom is “about two hundredths of a millionth 
of a centimeter, but this is about one hundred thousand times 
as large as that of the electron, so that the diameter of an elec- 
tron is about two tenths of a millionth of a millionth of a 
centimeter.” ! 

Now, the amazing smallness of the electrons and their incred- 
ible velocities are things to wonder about, but they are not of es- 
pecial interest to the student of philosophy. What he is inter- 
ested in is the problem of reality, and what he wants to know is 
what the electrons are made of, since they are, according to the 
theory now assumed, the ‘‘stuff’” of which the world is made. 
But before we take up this problem, it may be well to tarry for a 
moment over certain other wonderful revelations of these studies 
in radio-activity. One of them is the fact that a prodigious 
amount of energy is locked up in the atoms of ordinary matter, 
and is liberated when the atoms are disintegrated, and concelv- 
ably might be used. A single pound of ordinary matter, it is 
said, contains enough energy to drive all the ships of our navy. 
It is possible that science will learn how this energy may be uti- 
lized, taking the place ultimately of our spent coal mines and 
gasoline wells. This, we might suppose, would be a great boon. 
Possibly; but I think it was Sir Oliver Lodge who said he hoped 
that this discovery would not be made until man had acquired 
sufficient moral balance to be trusted with this new store of en- 

1 John Mills, Within the Atom, p. 14. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM 231 


ergy. From present indications that will not besoon. Sir Ernest 
Rutherford, however, in a later address! expresses doubt, not 
only about the availability of this energy, but even about its ex- 
istence in other atoms. He suggests that “the presence of a 
store of energy ready for release is not a property of all atoms, 
but only of a special class of atoms like the radio-active atoms 
which have not yet reached the final stage of equilibrium.” 

Thus it comes about that the atom, instead of being, as was 
formerly thought, a stable and imperishable entity, has all the 
marks of being a created thing. It seems to be a kind of structure 
and a storehouse of energies. It seems as if some one or some- 
thing had made it and stored up the energy init. Probably this 
creative process has extended through inconceivable ages of 
time, taking the form, perhaps, of an inorganic evolution, in 
which the heavier elements have been evolved from the lighter 
gases In some ‘‘cosmic crucible.” If this be true, we instinc- 
tively wonder what the agency is which has accomplished this. 
This is all, of course, very speculative. Here and now it seems to 
be the reverse process that is going on, the disorganization rather 
than the creation of the elements. 

But now let us return to our original problem and see whether 
in the light of the electrical theory of matter we can get any 
notion of the stuff of which the physical Universe is made. At 
first sight it appears that we have traced reality down to the 
electron and the proton, both being forms of electricity, so that, 
if we would know what the world is made of, we must find out 
what electricity is. And so again we repair to the physicist 
and ask him what it is. To which he replies that electricity is 
merely a name inclusive of a certain class of phenomena, of 
which the simplest illustration is the behavior of a piece of 
sealing wax when rubbed by a piece of silk. Such a piece of 
sealing wax is found to “attract”? small objects like paper and 
pith balls. What electricity is, he says, we do not know.? It 
appears now to be atomic or granular in its structure, but 


1JIn Science, September 21, 1923. 

2 See the interesting chapter entitled ‘‘ Foundations of the Universe” in The 
Outline of Science, edited by J. Arthur Thomson, vol.1, and the book by John 
Mills, Within the Atom. 


232 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


strictly it cannot be spoken of as either matter or energy. 
Possibly the electric particles are merely regions of stress or 
strain in the ether, so that the conviction arises that, after all, 
if we would go to the very bottom of this subject, we should 
find that energy is the one ultimate thing in the physical world. 
Scientists are, however, not generally ready to make this final 
statement. Just at present about all we can say with confidence 
is that there are three ultimate things, electricity, ether, and 
energy. And since ether is in doubt, there remains, perhaps, 
the final antithesis between electricity and energy. 


Energetics 

It has, however, for a long time been the conviction of some 
philosophers and scientists that energy is the final unity which 
our minds so love to find in nature. The view called “ener- 
getics’”’ has been a scientific creed rather than a philosophical 
theory, but it is closely related to the view of many philosophers. 
It has been said that all the fundamental attributes of physical 
things, such as inertia or mass, or even of extension, are func- 
tions of velocity and can thus be reduced to energy. 

If, now, one should hold this theory and attempt to gain 
from it a philosophy of reality, he would at once wish to know 
what energy is. But to this question again the science of 
physics can render no final answer. We learn that there are 
many kinds of energy — kinetic, potential, electric, and the 
energy of light and heat. We learn further that, while energy 
changes its forms — energy of motion, for instance, being turned 
into light or electricity — the sum total of energy in a closed 
system remains the same; no energy is ever lost or created. So 
we have the law of the conservation of energy. Energy has 
actually been defined as that which remains constant. Usually 
energy is defined as the capacity for doing work. But this 
definition is of little use to the student of philosophy, for, while 
there is lots of work being done, some of it evidently of a crea- 
tive kind, he is anxious to know who or what is doing the work. 

However, it appears upon further investigation that the 
physicist does know a great deal more about energy than that 


! 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM = 233 


it is the capacity for doing work and that the sum of it is con- 
stant, but his knowledge is of the quantitative kind. This 
knowledge does not tell us what energy 7s, but it. tells us what 
mathematical ratios prevail in its various manifestations.! 
When we wish to know what energy is, what it is like, science 
cannot tellus. But it is just this qualitative character of energy 
which the student of philosophy wishes to know about, a wish 
perhaps never to be satisfied. 

Nevertheless, this possible theory has been advanced. Al- 
though we cannot know what energy is in itself, there is one 
kind of energy which we do seem to know something about 
qualitatively — and this is the energy which we ourselves exert 


in willing. Effort seems to be a kind of energy and one of which 


we do seem to have some immediate knowledge. We may, 
therefore, make the hypothesis that physical energy is in its 
real nature Will, something of the nature of psychical energy. 

If to this the physicist responds that it is a mere guess and 
without evidence, one might reply as follows: ‘‘But you as a 
physicist have no theory of the real inner nature of energy, and 
this is at least one theory.”’ Furthermore, one might add, the 
theory that the ultimate energy of the world is psychical does 
find support in many ways. It would explain possibly the one 
thing in the world which Naturalism finds it so hard to explain, 
namely, mind; and it would seem to account for the creative 
activity so much needed, if we are to get any complete picture 
of the world movement. We hear much now of “creative 
evolution”? and ‘creative synthesis,’ of organization and in- 
tegration. These seem to be fundamental realities, which we 
have to assume, if we are to explain the evolutionary process; 
and it would unify our picture of the whole of reality, if we could 
think of the energy which physical science seems disposed to 
put at the very foundation of the physical world as a kind of 
psychical energy or Will, or perhaps Creative Will. Many 
philosophers from Schopenhauer down have made the postulate 
that Will, or Absolute Will, is the ultimate reality. Such views 


1 Compare Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, chap. 1v. Also Boodin, A 
Realistic Universe, chap. 111. 


234 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


would be greatly strengthened if it were possible to. believe 
that energy is the sole reality in the physical world and that 
such energy is of a psychical character. That some modern 
physicists are thinking along these lines may be illustrated by 
the following quotation from an English scientist: 

What we have to contemplate is, in my opinion, the remodelling of 
our system of dynamics on the basis of energy in the place of mass. 
We may then begin to contemplate the ultimate possibility of a future 
remodelling, in which mind will replace energy as the fundamental 
basis of the physical scheme.} 


This world view that energy is the foundation of all physical 
reality and that energy qualitatively considered is psychical 
in its nature — something like will — is certainly attractive. 
It is a monistic view, and although it was suggested by tracing 
down the physical constitution of material things to their final 
ground, it turns out to be not Materialism at all, but a kind of 
Dynamism, and in the form mentioned above almost identical 
with Spiritualism, since it finds as the world basis something 
like mind. 

Attractive as the view may be, however, it encounters seri- 
ous difficulties. The first of these is the supposition — gratui- 
tous it may seem to some — that energy is in its inner nature 
psychical. That the living and changing world does require 
the assumption of an organizing and integrating power we have 
come to believe through the study of living forms and their 
evolution; and that this is a purposive power in some sense has 
also appeared to be reasonable; and that it is something of the 
nature of Will is possible. If this be true, it would perhaps be 
permissible to apply the adjective ‘‘psychical” to it; but that 
this 1s what the physicist means by “energy” is almost surely not 
true. To say, therefore, that science has reduced matter to 
energy, and that this energy qualitatively considered may be 
something psychical in its inner nature, is to say what has little 
meaning to a physicist. Energy to him is nothing more than 
that peculiar capacity which things in their various states have 


1G. W. DeTunzelmann, A Treatise on Electrical Theory and the Problem of the 
Universe (J. B. Lippincott Company), p. xvi. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM = 235 


of producing changes. He cannot know, and does not try to 
say, what energy 7s. He does not even say what energy does. 
He sees that work is done and that changes are produced, and 
this capacity he calls energy; and this capacity can be measured 
and expressed in various equations and formule, and this is as 
far as his knowledge goes. The trouble comes, as Perry points 
out, in thinking that because ‘‘energy’”’ is a single word, there- 
fore it is a single thing or entity. So far as the actual knowledge 
of the scientist is concerned, energy is a ratio or relationship 
between elements of our experience. Of course, the physicist 
does not know that there may not be some metaphysical entity 
corresponding in some way to what he calls energy; but energy 
as he knows it is not such an entity. Indeed, energy is less 
emphasized in the new physics, especially since the theory of 
relativity has become prominent, ‘atoms of action” taking 
the place of energy, according to the quantum theory.! 
Another difficulty with the theory called Energetics arises 
from the fact that science does not at present reduce ultimate 
physical concepts to one—namely, energy. The present 
analysis seems rather to stop with two — energy and electricity 
—or perhaps with three —energy, electricity, and ether. 
Furthermore, it appears that positive and negative electricity 
are different ‘‘entities,’’ if we may call them entities, so that 
any monistic hope coming from pure science seems to be vanish- 
ing. The physicist cannot answer the question, which we as 
students of philosophy are eager to have answered, about the 
ultimate nature of reality. All that he can say is that in his 
analysis of physical phenomena he finds these three or four 
ultimate concepts, in terms of which he can formulate what 
happens within the field of his science, namely, positive and 
negative electricity, energy, and perhaps ether.? Of course, 
then, the student of philosophy would doubtless reflect that 


1 See Bertrand Russell, The A BC of Atoms, chapter x11. 

2 Or, stated more accurately, according to Mr. Russell, electrons, hydrogen 
nuclei, and (according to the quantum theory) atoms of action. Mr. Russell 
suggests the possibility, speculative at present, that the electrons and hydrogen 
nuclei may be ‘‘states of strain in the ether or something of the sort,” so that 
the ether may after all be the ultimate reality. 


236 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


while such a group of concepts may suffice for the physicist, 
it would not necessarily suffice for the biologist, who would 
need these concepts and others, such as life itself, or creative 
synthesis, or the direction and coérdination of energies. And 
he might also reflect that even the physicist’s analysis of the 
total situation in his own field must, to be complete, add another 
concept, namely, the mind which does the observing and the 
formulating. Still further, it would appear that any analysis 
of the complete situation, even a merely “‘physical”’ situation, 
involves mathematical and logical as well as physical and 
psychological facts. The final result seems, therefore, to lead 
to some form of Pluralism rather than to any kind of Monism. 

At any rate, Materialism has passed away. It has no longer 
any interest either to the physicist or the philosopher. The 
analysis has gone far beyond ‘“‘matter.’”’? Even if we substitute 
electricity for matter, it is evident that there are other realities 
in the world than electricity. Dynamism is a little better, 
perhaps, for, by its interpretation of all reality in terms of 
action and, possibly, of Will, it seemed to penetrate nearer to 
the core of reality. But it gets slight comfort now from the 
physicist. Finally, Naturalism seems to have fared little 
better. It is a little difficult to know what Naturalism means, 
and when interpreted monistically it encounters no less diffi- 
culties than Materialism. 

But, after all, is it a fruitful method of studying philosophy, 
this attempt to analyze our rich experience into certain lifeless 
elements which we call first principles? Is there any such 
science as ontology? Perhaps reality is to be sought in events, 
rather than in first principles.! Possibly electricity, energy, 
and ether are neither ultimate realities nor first origins. Per- 
haps the mathematician’s discovery of Space-Time takes us 
back to a “stuff”? more primordial even than the electrical 


1 The traditional view of reality as consisting of material particles existing 
in a spaceless time and moving in a timeless space seems no longer to be main- 
tained even by physicists. Compare Mr. A. N. Whitehead’s two noteworthy 
books, The Principles of Natural Knowledge, and The Concept of Nature (Cam- 
bridge University Press). Compare also the chapter entitled ‘‘The Revolt 
Against Matter,’ in R. F. Alfred Hoernlé’s book, Matter, Life, Mind, and God, 


THEORIES OF REALITY — MATERIALISM = 237 


units of the physicist. Perhaps reality is to be found in the 
forward look rather than in the backward look, in synthesis 
rather than in analysis. Or, if we must think that there was 
a time when only rocks and water and earth existed, with no 
life and no mind, perhaps rocks and water and earth represent 
just a stage in the world process, a halting-place of the Creative 
Will, or a stepping-stone to life and mind and society. Then 
we might say that life, mind, and social organization are the 
realities, and atoms and electrons just indzspensables. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (Longmans, Green 
and Company), chaps. 11 and Iv. 
“Foundations of the Universe,” in The Outline of Science (edited by J. 
Arthur Thomson, G. P. Putnam’s Sons), vol. 1, chap. vi. 


Further references: 
Friedrich Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy (Henry Holt and Company), 
book 1, chap. 1, pp. 53-86. 


Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Home University Library, 
Henry Holt and Company), chap. 1, “Appearance and Reality’’; chap. 
u, “The Existence of Matter’; chap. 11, ‘‘The Nature of Matter.” 


James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism (The Macmillan Company), 
vol. 1. (The best criticism of Naturalism.) 


John Mills, Within the Atom. (D. Van Nostrand Company.) 


A. N. Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge Uni- 
versity Press) and The Concept of Nature (Cambridge University 
Press). 


W. T. Marvin, An Introduction to Systematic Philosophy (The Columbia 
University Press), chap. XXII. 


Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy (Charles Scribner’s Sons), sec. 60. 
F. A. Lange, History of Materialism. (Truebner and Company.) 
W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays. (The Macmillan Company.) 


Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe. ‘Translated by Joseph Mc- 
Cabe. (Harper and Brothers.) 


Herbert Spencer, First Principles. (D. Appleton and Company.) 
A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief. (Longmans, Green and Company.) 
Bertrand Russell, The A BC of Atoms. (EK. P. Dutton and Company.) 


CHAPTER. XIV 
THEORIES OF REALITY 
IDEALISM 


Definition 

Just as Materialism considers the Universe as grounded 
and rooted in matter, or in physical energy, so Idealism con- 
siders it as grounded in mind. In interpreting the world, Mate- 
rialism puts the emphasis upon mechanical and efficient causes, 
upon the conservation of energy, upon the movements of mass 
particles in space. It makes mind an incident in the process 
of evolution, contingent upon a highly developed nervous sys- 
tem in the higher animals. Idealism, on the other hand, puts 
the emphasis upon mind, as in some way prior to matter. It 
says, in effect, if you seek for elemental things, you will not find 
them in matter and motion and force, but in experience, in 
thought, in reason, in intelligence, in personality, in values, in 
religious and ethical ideals. These are the world’s realities and 
they have a cosmical rather than a mere human significance, 
while matter, physical bodies, and physical forces are in some 
way secondary, being perhaps a kind of externalization of mind 
or else a phenomenon or appearance to mind. Materialism 
says that matter is real and mind an incident or accompaniment. 
Idealism says that mind is real and matter just an appearance. 

The two views seem thus to be radically and irreconcilably 
opposed. If either one is true, the other must be false; and 
philosophers generally have inclined to think that one of the 
alternatives is true. But the opposition has become much 
softened of late. Recent studies in physics have changed our 
notions about matter. Recent studies in psychology have 
changed our notions about mind. Perhaps what we call matter 
is not so primordial as we used to think. It may be reduced to 
the electric charge, to pure energy, to singularities in the space- 
time manifold, or, as Mr. Whitehead so wisely tells us, to the 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM 239 


““nassage of events,” thus becoming a mere halting-place in the 
cosmic process. ‘There seems to be something back of the physi- 
cal, logically prior to it, conditioning it. And evolution itself 
may be creative. Creative synthesis may be the condition of 
any advance in evolution, and creative synthesis seems to lie 
quite outside the system of physical concepts which used to be 
invoked so confidently in the older Materialism and Naturalism. 

And our notions of mind have changed. It is no longer that 
simple substance, whose nature is to think. Mind is a highly 
complex affair, including profound impulsive cravings, adaptive 
behavior, selective choice, and finally consciousness and mean- 
ing and personality. If in its most highly perfected form, as 
In human personality, it is found only in connection with a 
highly integrated nervous system, it will by no means follow 
from this that it is an incident in the evolutionary process or 
less real than matter. Quite the contrary, it may be something 
which is the perfect realization of the whole evolutionary move- 
ment, the most real thing, in a sense the only real thing, 
itself creative, as we know that it is, of newer values, such as 
art, philosophy, literature, science, history, and appreciative of 
older values, such as beauty, righteousness, truth. 

If Materialism means simply that matter and physical forces 
are structural stages which condition the full efflorescence of 
mind, a kind of ladder up which Nature climbs to mind, few 
could object to it. But if it means that mind is a useless and 
otiose appendage to a world process essentially physical, it is 
doomed to be superseded by a more idealistic world view. And 
if it means that something called matter was either the beginning 
or is to be the end of the evolutionary movement, or was indeed 
at any time an exclusive reality, it will be a philosophy difficult 
to defend. 


Idealistic theories 

But now we must examine more in detail that view of the 
world which is most opposed to Materialism. This view has 
usually been called Idealism, but since the latter word is am- 
biguous, sometimes referring merely to a theory of knowledge, 


240 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the idealistic world view is sometimes called Spiritualism. But 
this is also an ambiguous word, referring in popular language to 
a certain religious belief which hinges upon the possibility of 
communication with an alleged spirit world. Spiritualism in 
philosophy, however, means nothing more than that the world 
is grounded in spirit or mind. If the word “spiritualism” is 
more exact, the word “idealism” is more attractive and in more 
common use. 

To write the history of Idealism would be almost to write 
the history of philosophy, so many of the world’s great thinkers 
have been Idealists. But they have represented many different 
kinds of Idealism, sure to be confusing at first to the reader. 


Platonic Idealism 

The oldest system of Idealism in European philosophy is 
that of Plato, and perhaps after all it is the best. Nothing 
more wonderful than this has been projected by the creative 
power of human thought, perhaps nothing more elevated, 
possibly nothing more true. No real account of it can be given 
here. One must read some of the great Platonic dialogues as 
given in the beautiful English rendering of Benjamin Jowett; for 
instance, the dialogues called the Phedo, the Phedrus, the Sym- 
posium, and the Protagoras. 

Plato was not an Idealist in the extreme sense that there is 
nothing in the Universe except mind. His teaching was rather 
that the significant things in the world — that is, the real 
things — are Ideas, and by Ideas he did not mean any kind 
of merely mental states. He meant real objective things or 
‘‘forms’’ which are not material. They are eternal essences, 
forms or types, serving as patterns, ideals, standards, for the 
things of sense. Beauty, truth, justice, goodness, are illustra- 
tions of such Ideas. These are the cosmic realities, while what 
we call matter he named Non-Being, not intending to say that 
it does not exist in a way but that it is without significance 
except as a kind of crude stuff or material; and even at that 
a source of disorder and evil and imperfection. The enduring — 
things, the things worth while, are the things we think about, 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM 241 


not the things we perceive with the sense organs. Plato had 
little interest in things of the body, but an absorbing devotion 
to things of the spirit — to justice and beauty and mathe- 
matical relations and social ideals. His Idealism was more 
like that of popular thought; that is, a philosophy of ideals. 
Such a philosophical system as that of Plato could hardly be 
called Spiritualism, and if it is to be called Idealism, it is of 
an objective, metaphysical type. It is a philosophy of ideals 
rather than of ideas. In some ways, thus, the Platonic Idealism 
is more like the modern popular conception of Idealism, as 
a kind of moral striving after ideals or higher values, than it 
is like strict philosophical Idealism, which is the doctrine that 
only mind is real. 


Subjective Idealism 

Let us contrast the Idealism of Plato with a modern type, 
very different and perhaps harder to understand. George 
Berkeley, a brilliant Irish philosopher of the eighteenth century, 
thought that the sin and evil of his time came from a wrong 
philosophy, from Materialism; and he essayed to show that 
there is no such thing as matter in the sense of an inert sub- 
stance existing independently. The things which we call 
material are objects of experience, and these objects of experi- 
ence, such as trees and houses and clouds, are not material 
things; they are just perceptions. When we say that anything 
exists —for instance, a tree— we mean that it is perceived. 
It exists, of course, but it has no existence independent of a 
mind that perceives it. As we should say, an object like a tree 
is merely a bundle of sensations, and these are wholly sub- 
jective. The world, therefore, is a mental world. 

What, then, zs Reality? asks Berkeley. Only minds or spirits 
or souls are real, he replies. You exist and I exist and God 
exists; in other words, God, the infinite Spirit, and a realm of 
finite spirits. That which we call nature, with its regular laws 
and sequences, is simply the action of the divine mind upon our 
finite minds. We must not suppose, however, that Berkeley 
taught that objects of sense are illusions or that God deceives 


Q42 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


us. Objects are real, only they are not independent of a 
perceiving mind. In fact, there is, said Berkeley, nothing in 
the Universe except the infinite Spirit and a realm of finite 
spirits. 

This Berkeleian Idealism has sometimes been called “‘Sub- 
jective Idealism,’ and will be studied further in our chapter 
on ‘Theories of Knowledge,” for evidently it springs from an 
attempt to define the limits of our knowledge. It does not 
seem to give us a very satisfactory theory of reality, for the 
first thing one asks is, What was the world before human minds 
existed? Were not the mountains and the seas and the stars 
existing then as now? Of course, Berkeley can argue — and his 
reasoning is subtle and hard to refute — that mountains and 
seas and stars are ideas in the last analysis. Surely, he would 
say, in those primeval days that you speak about, they were 
not called mountains nor seas nor stars, since there was no one 
to name them, nor were the mountains blue, nor the seas green, 
nor the stars red, for these colors are sensations depending upon 
the eye and there was no eye to see them. And so it is, said 
Berkeley, with all the qualities that make up these “objects” 
of perception. Try to imagine what you could mean when you 
say that anything exists when not perceived. You will be sure 
to attribute to it some quality of sensation, just as if it were 
perceived. 

This philosophy, so skillfully defended by the witty Irish 
bishop, certainly reduces the whole world to mind with a venge- 
ance. Only minds exist. So-called external things are merely 
the perceptions of sentient spirits. This is Berkeley’s cele- 
brated subjectivism, subjective Idealism, psychism, or mental- 
ism, as it has been called. Later we may inquire as to its valid- 
ity. Science perhaps cannot prove the objective and external 
character of the things it studies, but it usually makes the postu- 
late that they are real and independent of the perceiving mind 
and this postulate vindicates itself by its results. 


The Idealism of Leibniz 
Let us now consider another kind of Idealism quite different 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM 243 


from that either of Plato or of Berkeley and more instructive 
than the latter, namely, that of the German philosopher, 
Leibniz, to whom reference has already been made in the pre- 
ceding chapter. Leibniz believed, as we all instinctively do, 
that the physical things we see about us and study in the sci- 
ences have a real objective existence independent of the mind 
that perceives them; only when we come to examine into the 
real nature of these objective things, we discover that in their 
inner being they are mental or spiritual. 

To understand this kind of Idealism, it is a good plan to go 
back to the theory of atoms. Consider that all objects of sense 
are made up of certain ultimate units commonly called atoms. 
But now think of these ultimate units, not as themselves phys- 
ical or material things, having physical qualities such as size and 
shape, but as psychical units, little souls, having the power of 
perception and of development. They are centers of force 
rather than material things. Leibniz did not call them atoms, 
but Monads, and he thought that physical bodies are composed 
of groups of Monads, and that the human soul is a governing 
Monad. If it seems difficult to understand how physical bodies 
can be made up of unextended centers of force, we may recall 
that our modern atoms according to the electron theory are 
nothing but energy systems, and we cannot understand how 
even molecules are made of them. ‘That physical bodies may 
be made up of centers of psychical energy need not present 
great difficulty to any one who has attempted to master the 
structure of the modern physical atom. If, however, Leibniz’s 
Idealism seems to any one to be at a disadvantage here, it is, 
like other idealistic systems, at a great advantage when it comes 
to explaining mind, for the mind is, as Leibniz shows, just a 
Monad, an immortal and spiritual being, differing from the 
Monads that make up physical bodies only in its higher degree 
of development. 


Panpsychism 
Closely related to the last view, but more modern, is another 
kind of Idealism called Panpsychism. The word denotes the 


244. INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


doctrine that all reality is psychic in nature. Panpsychism, as 
it is usually held, teaches that everything has mind. Mind is 
not something gained late in evolution when organisms acquire 
complex nervous centers or a brain. Mind is universal through- 
out nature. Every atom or particle in the Universe has life, 
mind, and memory. The whole world, organic and inorganic, 
is thus vitalized and mentalized. 

But if we think of every atom and particle having something 
psychical in it, of course we ask the question, What is the rela- 
tion of the psychical to the physical part? To this question - 
Panpsychism answers that the reality of the particle is psychical, 
and its physical part is only its phenomenal or outer aspect. 
Reality is contrasted with appearance. The former is mental, 
the latter physical. The reality of the world is found in “‘mind- 
stuff,’’ perhaps in consciousness. 

This kind of Idealism is welcome to many modern psychol- 
ogists who have upon their hands the problem of the connection 
of mind and body. Dualistic and interaction theories have their 
difficulties. Mind and brain seem to be in incessant correla- 
tion. There is no psychosis without neurosis. And something 
like Panpsychism, or Psychical Monism, which affirms that the 
mind is the sole reality and the body its outer appearance as it 
is seen by others, seems to offer a solution of the problem. 

Able and interesting expositions of this view may be found in 
Paulsen’s Introduction to Philosophy, in the writings of W. K. 
Clifford,! in C. A. Strong’s Why the Mind Has a Body, and in 
the writings of Samuel Butler. In James Ward’s important 
book called Naturalism and Agnosticism, a somewhat similar 
theory is maintained, although the book is mainly critical, only 
the barest outline of a constructive view being presented. Ward 
points out that the concepts used in science and useful in the 
special work of science — such, for instance, as mechanism, 
causality, matter, and motion — do not have so profound and 
universal significance as is commonly supposed in these days of 
science progress. They do not apply to the deeper spiritual 
realities which lie back of the phenomenal world, so that in the 


1 Lectures and Essays, vol. tu. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM 245 


more real world of the spirit we can be assured of freedom, pur- 
pose, and God. 

In the work of the remarkable German philosopher, Fechner 
(1801-87), a similar kind of Idealism appears. To Fechner the 
world is ensouled. The Universe is instinct with psychic life. 
Consciousness, as it appears in man, is only a part of a universal 
consciousness present in plants, in animals, in the Earth, and in 
the Universe. The world is a great organism, a psycho-physical 


organism, having, as has man, a body and a soul. This, how- 


ever, is not interpreted dualistically, for the emphasis is all put 
upon the psychical side, which is the reality, while the body is the 
outer expression or appearance of the real inner soul life. Thus, 
plants and animals have souls, as wellas man. Fechner speaks, 
too, of the Earth soul, and finally of the soul of the world, which 
is God. The physical world is but the outer expression of the 


inner life of God. The material Universe is the body of God, | 


‘‘the living visible garment of God.” 


Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, 
And weave for God the Garment thou see’st Him by.’! 


This Fechner calls the Day view, as contrasted with the Night 
view of Materialism. 

We shall be interested in reading the spirited defense of Pan- 
psychism by Paulsen. The following passage is worth quoting: 


Spontaneous activity everywhere! Your inert, rigid matter, mov- 
able only by impact, is a phantom that owes its existence, not to ob- 
servation, but to conceptual speculation. It comes from the Aristo- 
telian scholastic philosophy, which, after having completely separated 
all force or form from matter, left the latter behind as something abso- 
lutely passive. Descartes gets it from this source; it was a concept con- 
venient to his purely mathematical conception of physics: Matter is 
without all inner determination, pure res extensa, whose only quality is 
extension. Modern natural science has utterly discarded the idea of 
such absolutely dead and rigid bodies. Its molecules and atoms are 
forms of the greatest inner complexity and mobility. Hundreds and 
thousands of atoms are united in the molecule into a system that pre- 
serves a more or less stable equilibrium by the mutual interaction of its 


1 Read Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, book 111, chap. rx, for this reference to Goethe’s 
Faust. 


246 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


parts, and at the same time is quickened by other movements — by 
such as are felt by us as light and heat, and others, which appear in 
electrical processes. And this system, in turn, is in constant interaction 
with its immediate surroundings as well as with the remotest system of 
fixed stars. Is it, then, absurd to ask whether we have, corresponding to 
this wonderful play of physical forces and movements, a system of inner 
processes, analogous to that which accompanies the working of the 
parts in the organic body? May not attraction and repulsion, of which 
physics and chemistry speak, be more than mere words; is there not an 
element of truth in the speculation of old Empedocles that love and 
hate form the motive forces in all things? Certainly not love and hatred 
as men and animals experience them, but something at bottom similar 
to their feelings, an impulsive action of some kind.! 


Voluntaristic Idealism 

When psychologists place great emphasis upon the Will, as 
representing the really essential and fundamental aspect of 
mind, we speak of them as voluntarists. So when philosophers 
say that Will, or Absolute Will, or a society of individual Wills, 
is the really fundamental thing in the Universe objectively con- 
sidered, we may call this view Voluntaristic Idealism. This 
world view had its source in Kant, who in his practical philos- 
ophy exalts the Will as a kind of absolute reality. Schopenhauer 
is, however, the best representative of this theory. His great 
work is entitled The World as Will and Idea. It begins with the 
well-known statement, “The world is my idea.’’? Thus far he 
agrees with Berkeley, but Berkeley’s subjective Idealism he 
changes into an objective Idealism. If I examine my own mind, 
I find that the essential thing in it is Will, rather than intellect. 
The soul is activity, striving, struggling, desiring. My body is 
just the outward expression of my Will. So, Schopenhauer con- 
cludes, it is with the outer world. At heart it is Will, Absolute 
Will, and the phenomenal world which I see and hear and feel is 
the outer expression of the universal Will. Since, now, Will is 
something psychical, spiritual, and since all reality is Will, this 
system of philosophy is again to be classed as Idealism or Spirit- 
ualism. And it is objective or metaphysical Idealism, because 
the world is not merely my idea, but has as its basis an objec- 

1 Paulsen’s Introduction to Philosophy (Henry Holt and Company), p. 101. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM QA7 


tive reality, namely, the Absolute Will. More recent forms of 
Voluntaristic Idealism have been advanced by Wundt and 
Miinsterberg. 


The Idealism of Kant 

Schopenhauer’s Idealistic philosophy, like most of those of 
modern times, had its sourcein Kant. The Critique of Pure Rea- 
son was published in 1781.! In this great work Kant shows that 
the world which we know and which we study in the special sci- 
ences is a phenomenal world, a world of appearance, a mind-made 
world. This seems like the subjectivism of Berkeley, but Kant 
did not deny that there zs some objective reality back of phenom- 
ena. There is such a reality. We can think about it, but we 
cannot knowit. Kant calls it the Ding an Sich, or thing-in-itself. 
Really the world that we know is ideal. Its whole structure is 
determined by the activity of the Ego and the forms of the mind. 
Even space and time are just forms of our sense-perception. 
Any given object — such, for instance, as a tree which I perceive 
— is a mental construction. ‘The raw material, however, the 
sensations, are produced by an external reality, the nature of 
which we cannot know. Kant’s philosophy is that more usu-— 
ally called Phenomenalism, which means that our knowledge 
is limited to phenomena. Phenomena or appearances are as 
near as we can get to reality, though there is a reality beyond 
them. 

But, after all, this is not quite the whole story for Kant, In 
his practical philosophy, starting from the voice of duty, which 
speaks with an authority such as could not come from a merely 
phenomenal world, he arrives at a kind of noumenal or real world, 
a moral world order, giving us as necessary postulates God, free- 
dom, and immortality. Thus, Kant’s philosophy is thoroughly 
idealistic; it speaks of a world of ideas and ideals, yet is not that 
extreme Idealism which finds nothing real in the world except 
mind. 

1 One may read profitably from Watson’s The Philosophy of Kant, containing 
selections from his works. 


248 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Absolute Idealism 

One of Kant’s successors, J. G. Fichte, taught a still more out- 
spoken system of Idealism, in which all reality is swallowed up in 
the Ego; but it is the Absolute Ego, which is the supreme reality, 
and so we have the beginning of the Absolute philosophy, finding 
its best expression in the Absolute Idealism of Hegel. 

What is the world? asks Hegel. What is reality? Reality, he 
answers, is thought, reason. The world is a great thought pro- 
cess. It is, as we might say, God thinking. We have only to 
find out the laws of thought to know the laws of reality. What 
we call nature is thought externalized; it is the Absolute Reason 
revealing itself in outwardform. But nature is not its final goal. 
Returning, it expresses itself more fully in human self-conscious- 
ness and in the end finds its complete realization in art, religion, 
and philosophy. 

Such a philosophy as this takes our breath away. It seems 
like Idealism gone wild. It is magnificent, divine, but is it true? 
It reminds us of Plato, who takes us to the heavens and makes 
us see that our home is there. Leaving out much of Hegel’s 
forced and fanciful dialectic, there are aspects of his thought 
which are to-day suggestive. There is something fascinating in 
Hegel’s notion of the world as a great process of development, a 
notion shared with him by those two thinkers who have con- 
tributed so richly to the history of thought, Aristotle and Dar- 
win. But Hegel thinks of the world, not only as a process of 
development, but as a thought process, and adds finally that 
interesting suggestion that it has an ideal goal in art, philosophy, 
and religion. 


Modern English and American Idealism 

Since Hegel’s death, and drawing from him in greater or less 
degree as well as from Kant and Fichte, there have been many 
systems of Objective Idealism. They represent a powerful 
stream of thought, fed by many leading minds in Germany, 
Italy, England, and America, ranging from Absolute Idealism 
through Theistic Idealism, Voluntaristic Idealism, Personalism, 
and Panpsychism. Prominent among English Idealists may be 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM 249 


mentioned T. H. Green, Edward Caird, F. H. Bradley, A. E. 
Taylor, J. M. E. McTaggart, Bernard Bosanquet, H. H. Joachim, 
and R. F. A. Hoernlé; while in America we have G. 8. Morris, 
Josiah Royce, Mary Whiton Calkins, J. E. Creighton, George 
P. Adams, G. H. Howison, Borden P. Bowne, and many others. 
Books such as Royce’s Spirié of Modern Philosophy, Bosanquet’s 
Principle of Indiwiduality and Value, Green’s Prolegomena to 
Eithies, Calkins’s The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, George 
P. Adams’s Idealism and the Modern Age, Hoernlé’s Studies in 
Contemporary Metaphysics, Howison’s The Limits of Evolution, 
and Bowne’s Personalism, represent the idealistic tradition in 
its modern form. They should be carefully read by every stu- 
dent in philosophy. Their wholesomeness and their ethical Ideal- 
ism insure their lasting value. 

No general summary can be made of all the forms of Objective 
Idealism here mentioned without doing violence to some of them. 
In general, however, these various forms of modern Idealism re- 
gard the world as essentially spiritual, rational, intelligible, trans- 
parent to our reason, having moral significance. More particu- 
larly the world is some kind of organic unity, having internal 
relations such that the whole is determined by the part and 
the part by the whole. Hence results a final unity with har- 
mony in diversity. Asfor man, he is essentially a self, a person, 
and exists in organic relations to a society of selves and perhaps 
to an Absolute Self. 

Nearly all of these systems of Objective Idealism are prone 
to speak of the Absolute, the Absolute Idea, or the Absolute Self, 
or Absolute Experience. And the Absolute, unlike the word zn- 
finite in philosophy, does not stand for a mere superlative of ex- 
cellences. It means, rather, that final unity which has always 
been the quest of philosophy. It is the religious motive which 
gives us such joy in the shelter of the arms of the Absolute and 
it is the intellectual motive which finds such comfort in the no- 
tion of a final unity or wholeness or perfection. 


Personalism 
Special mention should be made of an interesting form of mod- 


250 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


ern Idealism known as Personalism.!. This philosophy takes its 
stand firmly upon the incontestable fact of personality. The one 
thing which I cannot doubt is the existence of myself as a per- 
son and a member of a society of persons. This philosophy em- 
phasizes personality, freedom, self-determination, moral respon- 
sibility, the existence of real evil in the world, and of a personal 
God, who struggles and strives with us for the overcoming of evil. 
The physical world is phenomenal, after the manner of Kant, so 
that this system of philosophy is decidedly idealistic or spiritual- 
istic. But the monistic character of modern Idealism has dis- 
appeared and the uniqueness and decisive individuality of the 
self in the society of selves gives to this philosophy a decided 
pluralistic turn. Personalism seems in a high degree to satisfy 
our religious needs, as escaping the pantheistic tendency of many 
other kinds of modern Idealism and putting a much-needed em- 
phasis upon freedom, moral responsibility, and the presence of 
real evil. 


Conclusion 

What in conclusion are we to say in praise of Idealism or in 
criticism? ‘To the student of philosophy so many different sys- 
tems must seem confusing — as many systems, it would appear, 
as there are philosophers to make them. Perhaps they are all in 
error and no theories of ultimate reality are possible. But 
I think this attitude of discouragement is not at all justified. 
Perhaps there are common elements in all these systems. It may 
be that a careful analysis of them would show many points of 
agreement, or, what is better still, many converging tendencies. 

Certainly the Idealists all have much in common. ‘They re- 
fuse to believe that the world is a great machine. They deny 
the supreme importance of matter, mechanism, and the conser- 

1 Besides the writers mentioned, such as Borden P. Bowne, and G. H. Howi- 
son, attention should be directed to the journal called The Personalist, edited by 
Professor Flewelling at the University of Southern California. In England the 
personalistic emphasis is seen in the writings of H. Sturt, G. T. Stout, H. Rash- 
dall, J. M. E. McTaggart, James Ward, and others. Most of these English Per- 
sonalists emphasize the ethical quality of reality and the will in finite persons, 


while the American Personalists stick more closely to Kant and place more em- 
phasis upon the idea of God and the religious motive. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM 251 


vation of energy, as explaining our world. They feel that some- 
how certain sciences, such as psychology, logic, ethics, esthetics, 
have to do with things basal and intrinsic, that they are quite 
as much a key to nature’s secrets as are physics and chemistry. 
They believe that the world has a meaning, a purpose, perhaps a 
goal, and that there is a kind of inner harmony between the heart 
of the Universe and the soul of man, such that human intelligence 
can pierce through the outer crust of nature and penetrate to its 
inner being, at least in some slight measure. 

Thus Idealism finds a kind of responsiveness to our human 
longings in the whole of nature. There is not merely the idle 
longing for immortality, for beauty, for righteousness, for an 
ideal life. There is a demand for them. Idealism thus answers 
to our ethical, esthetic, religious, and romantic demands. It 
proposes an intelligent and an intelligible world, of which at least 
either the warp or the woof must be something akin to thought 
andfeelingand will. Ina word, Idealism believes that an actual 
anterpretation of the world, not a mere description, is possible. 

Perhaps nowhere has the spirit of Idealism been better ex- 
pressed than by William James, the Realist, when he says that 
this world of wind and water is not the one divinely aimed at 
and established thing, but that we must believe in a spiritual 
order lying back of this material order and giving to the latter its 
value and significance. 

The impatience that we feel toward idealistic theories of real- 
ity springs, no doubt, from several sources. Modern thought 
leans very heavily in the direction of the exact sciences, no sys- 
tem of philosophy being welcome which does not harmonize 
with the results of these sciences; and it has seemed to many that 
Idealism does not properly evaluate the concrete facts which are 
the objects of study in the natural sciences. We are irritated if 
we are told that these concrete facts are merely “‘ phenomena” or 
appearances of some unknown thing-in-itself which “‘lies back of 
them,” or that they are made of mind-stuff, or that they get 
either their form or their substance from the mind that perceives 
them. 

But on the other hand, although perhaps in these days our 


252 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


prevailing moods are scientific, we are not always in such moods. 
Sometimes we are in quite different moods, such, for instance, as 
ethical, sesthetical, religious, or social, and then we can under- 
stand the great truths which are embraced in the idealistic phi- 
losophies. Indeed, later systems of Idealism, such as those of 
Royce and Bosanquet, are based directly upon such great truths 
as those of individuality and value — and their appeal to us 
rests upon a recognition of the fact that the world revealed to us 
by the physical sciences is a true world but not the whole world, 
nor even perhaps a fair sample of the whole world, and that 
neither in the study of the sciences nor in the experiences of our 
divided selves do we quite get down to what Bosanquet calls 
“‘the real thing.”? Hence in such idealistic philosophies we find a 
release from the fragmentariness and conflict and division which 
commonly hedge us about. We long for unity and wholeness 
and ideal value and we cannot help believing that in the whole of 
reality, if we could grasp it, there is such unity and wholeness 
and value, and that our thought processes and our ethical striv- 
ing and our esthetic pleasures are in some way revelations of the 
essential structure of the world. 

And so I think we may be Idealists without reducing the Uni- 
verse to mind-stuff, just as we may be scientists without reduc- 
ing it to matter-stuff. It is possible that Idealists have empha- 
sized too much the processes of thought and inference in our 
- mainds as revealing the structure of reality and not enough the 
equally fundamental — perhaps more fundamental — quality 
of Striving. If we could think of the world as a great movement 
in which “formative impulses are struggling up through chaos 
into ordered freedom” or as a developmental process in which 
values, mental, moral, esthetic, and social, are being slowly but 
surely realized, perhaps even against real obstacles, then we 
could still be Idealists, but Idealists who would speak less of 
edeas and more of zdeals. 


_In connection with this chapter read: 
Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Houghton Mifflin Com- ~ 
pany), chap. x1, ‘‘ Reality and Idealism.” 


THEORIES OF REALITY — IDEALISM 253 


Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (Longmans, 
Green and Company), part 1. 


Further references: 

Arthur Kenyon Rogers, English and American Philosophy Since 1800 
(The Macmillan Company), chaps. v, v1. 

George P. Adams, Idealism and the Modern Age. (Yale University Press.) 

Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual. 2 vols. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 

Aliotta, The Idealistic Reaction Against Science. ‘Translated by Agnes 
McCaskill. (The Macmillan Company.) 

William E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience. (Yale 
University Press.) 

May Sinclair, A Defence of Idealism (The Macmillan Company) and The 
New Idealism (The Macmillan Company). 

_ J. G. Fichte, ‘The Vocation of the Scholar,” “The Nature of the 

Scholar,” ‘‘The Vocation of Man,” in his Popular Works, vol. 1. 

Hegel, Philosophy of Mind. Translated by William Wallace. (Clarendon 
Press.) 

T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics. (Clarendon Press.) 

John Watson, The Philosophy of Kant. (The Macmillan Company.) 

J. H. Muirhead (Editor), Contemporary British Philosophy. (The Mac- 
millan Company.) 
Contains personal statements by contemporary British philosophers. 


CHAPTER XV 
THEORIES OF REALITY 
PLURALISM 


By Pluralism we mean the abandonment of the attempt to re- 
duce all reality to either one or two ultimate forms of being. ‘The 
world cannot be reduced either to mind or to matter, nor to mind 
and matter. Reality is neither one nor two, but many. 


The older Pluralism 

Examples of Pluralism in this sense are abundant. Empedo- 
cles, the early Greek thinker, was a Pluralist when he said that 
the four ultimate elements of reality are fire, water, earth, and 
air. Plato was a Pluralist when he reduced reality to the eternal 
Ideas, such as the Good and the Beautiful, for there are as many 
ideas as there are different concepts. Even Greek atomism, 
usually called the strictest materialistic Monism, was pluralistic 
in that the atoms have a kind of individuality depending on their 
size and shape. Modern Materialism — at any rate, previous 
to the advent of the electron theory — was a kind of Pluralism, 
since there are more than eighty different elementary substances. 

Likewise Idealism, or spiritualistic Monism, often reduces to 
a kind of Pluralism, as in the case of Leibniz’s system of Monads. 
Since the Monads are psychical in their ultimate nature, this sys- 
tem might be called spiritualistic Monism. Since they are all 
different from one another, each having a distinct individuality, 
we may call it Pluralism. 

Obviously distinctions of this kind are of no great value in 
philosophy. The monistic impulse is satisfied when we find 
unity in variety, and when this unity is absent, it is better to 
speak of the system as pluralistic. That Leibniz’s spiritualistic 
system of philosophy should be called Pluralism becomes evident — 
when we notice how quickly we ask what brings the Monads into 
harmony and unity, and since Leibniz does not give an answer 
which is satisfactory, the monistic element is insignificant. Such 


THEORIES OF REALITY —PLURALISM 255 


systems could be spoken of as systems of Monism only when our 
minds were ruled by the old notion of “‘substance.”’? The atoms 
or the Monads were the same in substance. 

But in recent times the word Pluralism has been used in a 
different sense. It indicates not so much an attempt to find out 
how many kinds of stuff the world is made of, and then to affirm 
that there are many kinds rather than one or two; nor even is 
it the attempt to construct the Universe of one kind of stuff 
moulded into many forms. It is rather an emphasis upon the 
many-sidedness and variety of the world; it is a protest against 
finding too much unity. This new Pluralism stresses the mani- 
fold character of the world, its variety and richness, its infinite 
diversities and novelties, even its discords and dissonances. 


The monistic impulse 

Possibly the monistic systems find their explanation simply in 
the infirmity of the human mind, which is helpless in the face of 
disorder and must find for itself some unity or system in things. 
It loves to reduce the manifold forms of experience to classes and 
the classes to larger classes, and in the end to reduce all things 
to some one final ‘‘substance’”’ or being — to mind, to matter, or 
to God. Back of all minds it seeks the Absolute Mind; back of 
all spirit, the Absolute Spirit; back of all wills, the Absolute Will; 
back of all experience, Absolute Experience. The human mind 
in its eager effort to understand the world seeks always a guid- 
ing thread to find its way through the maze of details. It hopes 
to find a ruling purpose, which if it could be grasped would 
show that the whole thing is a plan — perhaps a wise and bene- 
volent plan, having at its fountain head one absolute and omni- 
scient ruler; and finally it hopes to discover one unitary sub- 
stance, physical or mental, to which all reality can be reduced. 


The pluralistic reaction 

Now, Pluralism does not deny that there is a certain unity in 
the world; but in the face of the manifest diversities and incon- 
sistencies and disharmonies which experience reveals, it hesitates 
to accept too easily the monistic solution. Students of philoso- 


256 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


phy are beginning to feel that it is not quite so easy as at first 
appeared to find the guiding thread of life, and that it may be 
a trifle presumptuous to make too many affirmations about the 
Absolute. ‘There is, no doubt, a strong pluralistic tendency 
among philosophers at the present time. The new astronomy, 
the new physics, the new mechanics, the new logic, all emphasize 
the diversities, the immensities — not to say the strangeness or 
the wildness of the world. In olden times it was very comforting 
and composing to believe that the Earth was made for man and 
rested securely in the center of the Universe, watched over by 
an omnipotent and friendly Being. But now we learn that our 
Sun is only one of uncounted millions, and that there are stars 
whose light, traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, re- 
quires a million years to reach us. 

If we wonder at the largeness of the world, we are amazed 
at the smallness of its parts, when we learn that the atom, which 
is so minute that a cubic centimeter of hydrogen may contain 
54,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, yet is itself a system of elec- 
tric particles as Fett apart Une eae to their size as the stars 
in the heavens. 

Again, it was comforting to believe that space, though infinite, 
is subject to the geometry of Euclid, and that the Newtonian 
physics rules throughout the Universe, and that both time and 
space can be measured by fixed standards; but the theory of 
relativity has revealed here also a larger and a stranger world. 
Even the old Aristotelian logic, with its doctrine of substance, 
and of attributes inhering in the substance, and its classes of 
things additively grouped according to likeness and difference, 
is giving place to a new logic with its many kinds of relations 
and the relations themselves objective andreal. Evenevolution, 
which a few years ago seemed like a kind of magic key, destined 
to unlock the secrets of the Universe, is now found to be full 
of difficulties and at best to apply only to a part of what in the 
broader sense we may call nature. 

So Hamlet, when he says — 


There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy — 


THEORIES OF REALITY — PLURALISM 257 


sounds the note of the pluralistic movement. Although the 
mind craves for unity, it loves variety, too, and the pluralistic 
world view is not without its compensations. 

The world is so full of a number of things, 

I am sure we should all be as happy as kings, 
said Robert Louis Stevenson, and perhaps the adventurous spirit 
of the modern mind finds as much satisfaction in trying to solve 
the puzzle of a pluralistic world as the more fearsome spirit of 
the Middle Ages found in a wholly unified and comprehended 
system. Anyway, we have to face the fact of a world less unified, 
less integrated, and less harmonized than we used to think. 


A pluralistic Universe 

Not many years ago, William James wrote a little book called 
A Pluralistic Universe, which, together with his essay on Radical 
Empiricism and his Will to Believe, woke the philosophic world 
from its monistic slumber. It was James’s mission in philosophy 
as well as in psychology to leave the old well-beaten paths of 
thought and strike out into new ones. Asystem of philosophy in 
the older sense he did not have, but both psychology and philos- 
ophy have been revitalized by the series of galvanic shocks which 
came from his pen. 

James was weary of all the old absolutist philosophies, even as 
presented in their newest and most charming form by his col- 
league, Josiah Royce. James was not interested in the One, but 
inthe Many. Itis the “‘each-form,” rather than the ‘‘all-form”’ 
of things that impressed him — their discreteness, their sepa- 
rateness, their independence, their novelty, their freedom, their 
contingency, their spontaneity, their manifold, yes, even their 
chaotic character. He did not find any ‘“‘block universe”’ with 
‘a through-and-through unity.” Reality, he said, is of ‘‘the 
strung-along type.”’ ‘‘The word ‘and’ trails along after every 
sentence.”’ Reality is distributive rather than collective. Free- 
dom exists, and chance and novelty and progress. ‘‘New men 
and women, books, accidents, events, inventions, enterprises, 
burst unceasingly upon the world.”” Why seek for reality in such 
symbols as mind and matter and atoms and Monads? ‘The per- 


258 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


ceptual flux is the authentic stuff” of the world. ‘There is no 
possible point of view,” says James, ‘from which the world can 
appear an absolutely single fact. Real possibilities, real inde- 
terminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, 
catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real moral life, just 
as common sense conceives these things, may remain in empiri- 
cism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt 
either to ‘overcome’ or to reinterpret in monistic form.” ! 


The universe, in a word, is tychistic. Chance is real in it. Destruc- 
tion is as possible as salvation, and evil is as actual as good. What is 
central is the fact that evil and good are relations, and not substances, 
that each entity which struggles can of itself and in its own right con- 
tribute to the everlasting damnation or eternal salvation of the world. 
There is no eternal law; there is no overarching destiny, no all-com- 
pelling Providence. Law itself is no more than cosmic habit, a modus 
vivendi, which things that have come together by chance, and are stay- 
ing together by choice, have worked out as men work out communal cus- 
toms facilitating contacts. Whether gravitation or tobacco-smoking, 
there is a difference in scope, not in history! And the spontaneous in- 
dividualities whose collective habits the “laws of nature” express are 
greater and more real than those laws. These individualities in their 
privacy and inwardness are reals in the completest sense of the term, 
and through them the axis of larger being runs. How otherwise should 
the history of the cosmos unfold itself? 2 


Such a pluralistic world view as this does not in James’s philos- 
ophy issue in any pessimism, skepticism, or fatalism. Quite the 
opposite. It gives us a real freedom, and it gives us a real God 
—not a mere all-embracing omnipotent world unity. And it 
solves the problem of evil, which in the absolutist systems seems — 
so hard to explain. Monism, he says, really creates the problem — 
of evil. . 

This pluralistic, pragmatic, radically empirical philosophy, as 
presented by James, has a spicy, stimulating flavor, whetting 
our appetites for something more. But all we get is more of the — 
same kind and in the end we feel that something is lacking. It — 


1 The Will to Believe (Longmans, Green and Company), Pp. ix. f 
2 Horace Meyer Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson (University of — 
Chicago Press), pp. 182, 183. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — PLURALISM 259 


is, perhaps, because of the mind’s insistent demand for a unified 
world view that one feels a trifle impatient with the author of 
The Pluralistic Universe for not telling us something more de- 
finite about this Universe and the nature of the reality which 
lies beneath the perceptual flux. But perhaps James thought 
that we have already too many completely unified systems of 
philosophy. 


Pluralism among the new Realists 

If the “radical empiricism” of James issues in Pluralism, so 
also, it seems, does the quite different philosophy of the New 
Realism.} 

In this case it is not the richness and variety of the perceptual 
flux which holds our attention, but the richness and variety of 
the world of reason, of thought, and of values. We are brought 
to the sudden realization that there are many things in the 
world besides physical and mental things. Physical and mental 
things, events and processes, are real in this realistic pluralistic 
system, but so also are principles of reason, logical principles, in- 
ternal and external relations, numbers, space, time, series, and 
such ideal entities as justice and beauty. These latter non- 
physical and non-mental entities we may, if we choose, call sub- 
sistents, if we wish to limit the term exzstent thing to such as are 
conditioned by space and time. 

There is something exhilarating and emancipating about this 
new pluralistic view of the world to those who have been led to 
believe that there is nothing in the Universe but the mental and 
the physical — and possibly nothing but the physical. Such 
things as atoms and electrons, which quite possibly really exist, 
get put now in their proper subordinate place. Physical things, 
events, and qualities exist, but so do mental processes and mental 
events and qualities, and thus we are freed from the old tyranny 
of the monism of substance and the problem of interaction in 
its older form. | 

Not only does this new Pluralism free us from the tyranny of 


1A clear statement of this new Pluralism may be found in the book of 
Edward Gleason Spaulding, The New Rationalism, sec. Iv. 


260 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


matter, which has kept us so long enthralled, but also from the 
tyranny of evolution, a word which at the opening of the twenti- 
eth century had taken such complete possession of our thought. 
Pluralism reduces the significance and extent of evolution. The 
latter is a useful term in biology. With caution, perhaps, it may 
be extended to the inorganic world, but there are large fields of 
reality to which it does not apply. It does not apply, for in- — 
stance, to the standards of truth and value by which evolution 
itself is judged. It does not apply to God, nor to truth, nor to 
logical principles, nor to the eternal values. 

Again, even within the sphere of evolution the pluralistic 
view of reality gains striking support from the doctrine of crea- 
tive synthesis and theory of levels. At each new level, as the re- 
sult of organization, new realities emerge not found in the ele- 
ments which make up the lower level. Life and mind are the 
most striking illustrations of such new realities emerging from 
the synthesis of simpler elements. 

Spaulding goes even further here and discovers a still more 
remarkable fact, namely, that of freedom at each successive 
stage of organization. ‘‘At each level or stratum of reality 
formed by the non-additive organization of parts into a whole, 
qualities or phenomena are free to act in accordance with their 
own nature and their own causal connections with other qual- 
ities of this level.’’ ‘No higher level violates the laws of those 
lower levels; .. . but also no lower level causally determines any 
higher level.’”’ Freedom subsists, therefore, at each level as we 
ascend from the inorganic to the chemical, and then to the living 
and then to the mental and then to the ethical. Thus, biology 
is not a branch of physics, nor psychology of biology, nor ethics © 
of psychology. Each is a free and independent science corre- 
lated with the lower levels and not violating their laws, but intro- 
ducing new entities and new laws and thus exhibiting its own 
peculiar freedom. So the time has gone by when physics and 
biology can dominate psychology and ethics, and Naturalism 
with its bonds of determinism, which it hoped to fasten on the 
world, has been superseded; for at each higher level something 
new appears which is free to follow its own laws. 


THEORIES OF REALITY — PLURALISM 261 


Even here this realistic Pluralism does not stop. It throws 
light on the now much-discussed problem of values. It is no 
longer sufficient to say with Spinoza that things are good because 
we desire them, but now with Plato and the ancients generally we 
may say that we desire things because they are good. Justice 
and beauty and goodness are models, which we are ever ap- 
proaching, but never realizing. They are limits, “but the limit 
is not a member of the series of which it is a limit,’”’ so that we 
may probably say with Plato, strange as it sounds in these em- 
pirical days, that justice and beauty and goodness and truth 
are all themselves subsistent entities, “‘eternal’’ values, not con- 
ditioned by space and time. 

_ Again the pluralistic world view allows us to think of the Uni- 
verse as purposive and creative of values, and it allows us to give 
real objectivity to such concepts as color and beauty and justice 
and truth. We can once more think of beauty as resident in the 
work of art and not merely as existing in the mind of the beholder, 
and we can think of justice as a real end to be gained and not as 
something relative merely to the subject, and we can think of 
truth, not in the pragmatic sense of that which affords maximum 
satisfaction, but in the realistic sense of conformity with reality. 
In the direction of simplicity, therefore, there seems to be a dis- 
tinct gain in this realistic pluralistic philosophy. 

Pluralism gives us finally a view of God, not asa mere object 
of faith, not as the hypothetical creator of the world, not as a 
pragmatic ‘‘working scheme,” but as the ‘‘totality of values, 
both existent and subsistent, and of those agencies and efficien- 
cies with which these values are identical.” ‘‘God is Value, the 
active, ‘living’ principle of the conservation of values and of their 
efficiency.” ! 

Both the pluralistic and realistic character of this world view 
seem to be in harmony with many tendencies in present day 
philosophy. That strong desire which we have for unity and 
completeness is, to be sure, not satisfied in Pluralism; but there 
is compensation for this lack in its doctrine of freedom, of values, 
and of God. 


1 Spaulding, idem, p. 517, 


262 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Criticism 

To most minds, however, this philosophy is in need of supple- 
menting in two directions. First, a more satisfying conception 
of consciousness and of the mental life in general is desirable. 
Spaulding with certain other writers of the day speaks of con- 
sciousness as a dimension and a variable. But since a dimension 
is reduced to a linear series, and in the case of consciousness is 
about what we mean by a process, a more exact and significant 
description seems to be needed. The mere serial organization of 
such elements as are studied in neurology, physiology, physics, 
and chemistry, even though such organization results in a quali- 
tatively distinct dimension of reality, which we call awareness, 
does not yield a satisfactory description of those forces in the 
world which we call mental or psychical. 

The second thing which is lacking in this pluralistic system 
of philosophy is a more satisfactory determination of the source 
of the creative synthesis itself. We hear much of creative syn- 
thesis and organization, but the ground of them is not deter- 
mined. ‘This pluralistic Universe needs, after all, a soul, not a 
soul as a unitary principle, but a soul as a vitalizing agency. At 
any rate, some evolutionary urge in the existential world of time 
and space, some élan vital, some creative agency, some cosmic 
will is necessary, it would seem. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Edward Gleason Spaulding, The New Rationalism (Henry Holt and 
Company), pp. 482-37 and pp. 486-95. 


Further references: 

William James, A Pluralistic Universe. (Longmans, Green and Company.) 
The Will to Believe (Longmans, Green and Company), Preface. 

C. A. Richardson, Spiritual Pluralism and Recent Philosophy. (Cam- 
bridge University Press.) 

Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (The Mac- 
millan Company), Introduction, chap. 111; also pp. 71 ff., pp. 411 ff. 

G. H. Howison, The Limits of Evolution (The Macmillan Company), Ap- 
pendices A, B, C, and D. 


CHAPTER XVI 
THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL 


HISTORICAL 


One of the things which those who take up the study of phi- 
losophy hope to have speedily solved is the problem about the 
soul or the mind — and its destiny. It will probably be disap- 
pointing, therefore, to learn that this most vital of all questions 
is still far from solution. On the other hand, it will be en- 
couraging to know that in the last twenty years remarkable 
progress has been made in unraveling the mysteries of this 
most intricate and yet most interesting of all the problems of 
philosophy. Although the search for the soul will really be 
our task, let us for the moment substitute the word mind, which 
in psychology has now generally taken the place of the richer 
word soul. 


Can the mind understand itself? 

But is it, after all, strange that the problem of the mind should 
be so baffling? Science proceeds from the simple to the complex. 
The stars, so remote from human interest, were the first objects 
of study in ancient Assyria and Egypt. How incompetent those 
early astronomers would have been to study the subtile processes 
of their own minds! Then after astronomy came mathematics 
and physics, and in modern times chemistry and biology; and 
finally the most difficult sciences of all, psychology and sociology. 
All the sciences are the creation of the human mind; but the 
mind itself can be known and understood last of all. Can the 
mind know and understand itself? That it should even con- 
ceive of such a thing, or attempt it, is a witness to its marvelous 
supremacy. It is worth something to live in a time when in- 
quiries like these are in the focus of attention among scientists — 
and perhaps to have a share in their solution. 


264 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Initial perplexities 

The attitude of the reader in approaching the problem of 
mind is probably something like this: I have studied psychology; 
everybody takes a psychology course now. I have learned a 
lot about physical and mental processes, neurones and synapses, 
reaction-arcs and conditioned reflexes, stimulus and response, 
impulse and instinct, sensations and memory images, feelings and 
emotions, conscious and unconscious states, intelligence tests and 
I.Q.’s, complexes and inhibitions, conduct and behavior; and I 
understand that some of these are described-as physiological pro- 
cesses and some as mental processes; but it has never been made 
clear to me just what the difference is between a physical and a 
mental process, nor how they are related, nor how the mental 
processes are related to the mind, nor what the mind is. 

Furthermore, outside of psychological writings, I hear a 
great deal about the soul —in poetry, in literature, and in re- 
ligion. Having found that the word psychology is derived from 
two Greek words meaning soul and science, I supposed that this 
study would surely enlighten me; but I discover that some of the 
latest textbooks in psychology studiously avoid using the word 
soul, or even the word mind. Worst of all, in sermons and reli- 
gious meetings I have heard so often about the human spirit, 
as if the spirit again were something different from the mind. 
How I should like to have this whole muddle cleared up! When 
I asked about these things, I was told that these questions were 
metaphysical and that I should go to philosophy. My very first 
irruption into philosophy did not, however, do much to remove 
my difficulties; for I learned that my beloved Professor James, 
whose psychology had been so helpful, when he began to write as 
a philosopher, was the author of an article entitled ‘‘ Does Con- 
sclousness Exist?’? I had been told that souls were no longer 
mentioned in psychology and that consciousness has taken their 
place, and yet the very existence of consciousness was here 
questioned; and I have learned that in some of the most recent 
textbooks in psychology the word consciousness is hardly used. 
And, anyway, the meaning of the word consciousness was never 
clear to me. Sometimes it seemed to be used as synonymous 


: 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 265° 


with our whole mental life, while at other times it referred only 
to the present or passing aspect of it. 

Later we shall distinguish between the words mind and con- 
sciousness, and we may find that the words mind, soul, and spirit 
have not quite the same meaning; but for the sake of simplicity 
we may take as a point of departure the fact of an inner life 
of experience, which we call our mental or perhaps our psychical 
life, and that when we use the substantive words, mind, soul, 
consciousness, spirit, ego, self, they are merely different names 
applied to this inner life. Of course, these words are not syn- 
onyms, for mind and mental suggest intellectual activities, while 
soul and psychical are apt to call up emotional and vital elements. 
And sometimes when we think of the mind as separable from the 
body, we use the word spirit, while the adjective spiritual sug- 
gests moral and religious values. 


Plan of approach 

How shall we approach this most difficult of all subjects? The 
best way, I think, will be to devote one chapter to a brief histori- 
cal review of theories of the mind. Then in the next chapter 
we may see whether it is possible to gain some reasonable view 
of what the mind is, basing our study on recent attainments in 
the science of psychology and in the philosophy of mind. Ina 
third chapter we may consider the relation of mind and body. 
Incidentally we must distinguish our inquiry about the mind, 
which we call the philosophy of mind, from psychology, which 
is the science of the mind. Psychologists do, indeed, usually 
have some philosophy of mind — that is, some theory of what 
the mind is; but they may avoid this inquiry if they choose, con- 
fining themselves to a mere description and classification of men- 
tal phenomena and the formulation of the laws of mental behav- 
ior — that is, to strict psychology. 


Historical } 
Primitive man thought of the soul as a kind of shadowy image 


1 A luminous account of the history of theories of the mind may be found in 
William McDougall’s book, Body and Mind, chaps. 1 to Ix. 


266 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


or replica of the body, perhaps like a vapor, or breath, capable 
of leaving the body during sleep and surviving it after death. 
Greek philosophy and Greek literature are permeated with the 
idea of the soul, the Greek word, psyche, carrying a rich connota- 
tion of life, soul, and consciousness. ‘The earliest Greek thinkers 
believed in a “divine and animate essence,” immanent in nature, 
appearing in man as the soul, the source of life and intelligence. 
This view found expression in the doctrine of Heraclitus, who 
taught that the soul is a fiery vapor, identical with the rational 
and vital fire-soul of the Universe. Greek science, however, 
culminated in Democritus, who proclaimed the fact that all/physi- 
cal things are composed of material atoms in mechanical inter- 
action, and who believed that the soul also consists of smooth 
round atoms permeating the body. 


Plato 

But it is to Plato that we must look for the source of our pop- 
ular modern ideas about the soul. To Plato the soul is a dis- 
tinct immaterial essence or being, imprisoned, so to speak, in 
the body, its nature having little in common with the earthly, its 
home and destiny being the world of eternal Ideas. The person- 
ality and individuality and immortality of the soul, all stand out 
clearly in Plato’s teaching. Even its preéxistence is affirmed; 
the soul bringing with it a kind of reminiscence of its former ex- 
alted home, prior to its life in the body. It is, furthermore, the 
source of motion in the body, as well as the fountain of knowledge 
and aspiration. It is owing to its inner divine nature that the 
soul has intuitive knowledge of the world of Ideas and higher 
values. 

It would be hard to exaggerate the influence of this pure and 
exalted immaterialism of Plato in the history of thought, partic- 
ularly in the early doctrine of the Church. His sharp distinc- 
tion between the body and the soul was the source of the dualistic 
theories which have come down to us through the centuries, and 
with them the tendency to exalt the soul and its heavenly mission 
above the body with its earthly character. This Platonic doc- 
trine of the soul permeates our literature, finds expression in 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 267 


much of our most inspiring poetry, and is embedded deeply in 
our ethics, our religion, and our daily life. The historical im- 
portance of this soul theory has lately led to successful attempts 
to trace it back of Plato to the Orphic Mysteries and the Pythag- 
orean philosophy. Plato, to be sure, wavers in his account of 
the soul, ascribing an earthly origin to its lower parts and reserv- 
ing its immortality to its pure, godlike, rational part. But pos- 
terity has seized upon the graphic picture of the unitary, individ- 
ual, and immortal soul, which he presented in the beautiful 
dialogue, the Phedo. 


Aristotle 

Aristotle, no less than Plato, emphasized the reality and es- 
sential character of the soul; but he brings it into much closer 
relation to the body. It is the very “form” and reality and per-. 
fection of the body. It is the “primary actuality of a natural 
body endowed with life.” It has the same relation to the body 

that vision has to the eye; or the impression in the wax to the 
wax itself. At the same time, he considers the soul to be a sort 
of vital principle, almost identical with life —the source of 
movement and growth as well as of thought and reason. Finally, 
influenced by Plato, he ascribes to the soul an active or creative 
reason, which is of the very nature of the divine and is immortal. 

But the significant thing in Aristotle’s psychology is his notion 
that the soul is the purpose and perfection of the body, that for 
which the body exists and in which it finds its realization. This 
keen observation of Aristotle that the soul is the entelechy — 
that is, the end or perfection or purpose of the body, as if it 
were something for which the body exists, something in which 
the body is perfected — has become the seed of a recent scientific 
movement of great interest in the attempt to establish a philos- 
ophy of mind. 

The tendency toward the complete spiritualization of the soul 
and to a decided and uncompromising Dualism, already seen in 
Plato, culminated in the teaching of Saint Augustine and through 
him was handed on to the medizval Church and to modern 
thought. Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist, had already taught that 


268 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the soul is an immaterial substance, sharply distinguished from 
the body and separable from it. Thus there emerged the doc- 
trine of the existence of two worlds, a mundane material world 
and a divine spiritual world, the body belonging to the former 
and the soul to the latter. 


Descartes 

In the seventeenth century this dualistic conception was crys- 
tallized into a distinct philosophical system by Descartes, who 
is called the founder of modern philosophy. There are two sub- 
stances in the world, thought and extension, or, as we should say, 
spirit and matter, appearing in human beings as mind and body. 
In the body mechanism reigns supreme; while the mind is con- 
ceived as a pure thinking spiritual substance. So vividly does 
this French thinker conceive of the soul as an identical, simple, 
substantial being, that he actually attempts to locate it at a 
special point in the brain. But just in proportion as he insists 
on the pure spiritual character of the soul and the rigid mechan- 
ical character of the body, so was his difficulty greater in ac- 
counting for their action each upon the other; and that mind 
and body do interact seems evident from our momentary ex- 
perience. Thus the problem of the relation of mind and body, 
following from this strict Dualism, was bequeathed to Descartes’ 
successors. 


Hume 

This self-confident animism, coming down from Plato through 
Descartes, received its first rude shock from Hume, who bluntly 
said that we have no experience with any such thing as a soul at 
all, and no evidence of its existence. Experience gives us nothing 
but a lot of impressions or perceptions, and ideas or memory 
images, and we have no way of showing or reason for believing 
that the soul is anything more than the collection of these im- 
pressions and ideas. 


There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment inti- 
mately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence 
and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 269 


of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. ... For 
my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always 
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or 
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any 
time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the 
perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by 
sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said 
not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could 
I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution 
of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is 
farther requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. If any one, upon 
serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of 
himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow 
him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essen- 
tially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something 
simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there 
is no such principle in me.! 


As has been pointed out by many critics of Hume, he uses in 
the above passage the pronouns J, me, and mine, very freely, im- 
- plying a certain unity and concreteness of that which perceives 
and thinks, not very well characterized as a ‘‘bundle” of per- 
ceptions, or as a ‘‘theater’’ where impressions pass and repass in 
constant flux and movement.’ 


Kant 

Kant, examining more carefully the conditions of experience, 
while denying that the mind is a substance in the older sense, 
affirms that there can be no experience without the activity of 
the mind as a unitary subject having the power of creative syn- 
thesis. In the end Kant’s philosophy emphasizes the essential 
unitary spiritual character of the mind, of which Nature is hardly 
more than the phenomenal product. The ego is a pure thinking 
spirit.? 


The nineteenth century 
During the last century the foundations were laid in experi- 
1 Hume, Treatise on Human Nature (The Clarendon Press), book 1, part rv, 6. 
2 Compare the criticism in Mary Whiton Calkins’s The Persistent Problems of 


Philosophy, chap. v1. 
3 Compare Paulsen’s Kant, p. 185. 


270 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


mental science and in empirical psychology for a philosophy of 
mind more in keeping with our inductive scientific methods. Be- 
fore speaking of these later fruits, however, it will be well to re- 
view the principal theories of mind held by philosophers during 
the nineteenth century. For the most part they are the views 
still held, and by their several advocates are thought to harmon- 
ize with inductive and experimental studies. 
We may then distinguish these four classes of theories: 


1. Materialistic theories 

2. Dualistic or animistic theories 
3. Idealistic theories 

4. Double-aspect theories 


Materialistic theories of the mind 

Materialism in its older form affirmed that there is no other 
reality than matter, or mass particles in motion; that mind is in 
no way a distinct or different form of being, but is itself either 
a form or function of matter. Man is an adaptive mechanism, 
wholly explicable in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry. 
Consciousness arises in the transformation of energy in the highly 
complex mechanism of the nervous system, but is not itself a 
distinct form of energy nor a distinct form of being of any kind. 

Democritus, the Greek materialist, considered the soul to be 
composed of atoms, like the body, only of a smoother, rounder 
kind. Some of the German materialists of the eighteenth cen- 
tury spoke of thought as being a secretion of the brain. Haeckel 
in his Rzddle of the Universe believed that the mind is a func- 
tion of the brain. Among writers of this school, psychology, not 
dealing with any forms of reality beyond those considered in 
physics and chemistry, becomes a branch of physiology or biol- 
ogy. Inthe Naturalism of the present day it is believed that the 
methods and presuppositions of the physical sciences are also 
those of psychology and that the latter requires no others. 

Epiphenomenalism is a term sometimes given to one type of 
Materialism. This word was first used by Huxley; it indicates 
that mind is not a factor in natural processes; mind is a name 
that we give to certain phenomena that merely accompany types 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 271 


of processes and changes in the nervous system. Mental states 
are like a kind of aura, hovering about cerebral processes without 
themselves having any function; they effect no changes and have 
themselves no significance in the world movement. The laws of 
physics, chemistry, and physiology cover the whole field, and if 
fully known would enable us to understand the world of man and 
society. 


Dualistic or animistic theories 

Here belongs the ‘‘soul” theory, coming down from Plato 
and Descartes and familiar to every one. More specifically 
under this head we may mention, first, the everyday metaphys- 
ical Dualism taught by Descartes, accepted by Locke and popu- 
larized in America through the influence of the Scottish school. 
Mind and body are quite distinct, and represent the two universal 
realities. 

Somewhat similar to this, if more cautious, is the psychological 
- Dualism, brilliantly defended by William McDougall! With 
much courage McDougall has revived the use of the word Anz- 
mism? as a name for his philosophy of mind, which is nothing else 
than the usual soul theory. The mind — or, if we choose to use 
the other terms, soul, ego, self — is a unitary and distinct psychic 
being, in nowise to be identified or confused with the body with 
which it interacts. It possesses, or is, the sum of certain endur- 
ing capacities for psychical activity, such as having sensations, 
reacting to them, and guiding the stream of nervous energy in 
such a way as to neutralize the tendency of physical energy to 
dissipation and degradation. This emphatic dualism of mind 
and body does not, however, in McDougall’s opinion involve 
necessarily any Cartesian Dualism of the world. Itis content to 
affirm the distinction of mind and body in the human personality, 
and it is not, as it seems to me, this unequivocal distinction 


1 See his book Body and Mind, A History and a Defence of Animism. Fifth 
edition. See above, Chapter XII on ‘‘ Dualism.”’ 

2 The word animism has more commonly been used in anthropology to signify 
the tendency among primitive people to endow everything with mind, even 
things we regard as inanimate, such as sticks and stones. McDougall uses the 
term in its larger sense merely to indicate belief in mind (anima), as a reality. 


272 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


which contemporary schools are calling in question, but rather 
the more equivocal theory of interaction. 

Among other representatives of Animism; or the soul theory,. 
may be mentioned the German philosophers, Lotze, Stumpf, 
Kilpe; in America, George T. Ladd, and James in some of his 
moods; while in France, Bergson has defended a theory of mind 
somewhat closely related to Animism. | 


Idealistic theories 

In the third class we may include not only the strictly ideal- 
istic systems, but also the various panpsychic, personalistic, and 
mind-stuff theories. In this class we shall find the great major- 
ity of modern systems of thought; for Idealism has prevailed in 
all periods. And yet, perhaps, we shall get from none of them 
a perfectly clear notion of what the mind is; it is too all-inclusive 
to be clearly defined. Strictly they are theories of the world 
rather than of mind, interpreting the Universe in terms of con- 
sciousness, or will, or experience. So we hear much of experi- 
ence, self, will, and ideas. 

In the absolute or objective idealistic systems the whole Uni- 
verse is rooted and grounded in mind or spirit; call it Absolute 
Ego, as did Fichte, or Absolute Idea, with Hegel, or Absolute 
Will, with Schopenhauer, or Absolute Experience, with Bradley, 
or Absolute Self, with Royce. The soul of man is thus intimate 
with, or participates in, or represents, the very essence of reality. 
Mind is not something accompanying matter, or something gen- 
erated in an evolutionary process, but something primordial and 
original; it is the very stuff of the Universe. 

Still other forms of Idealism consider mind to be the essence 
of reality. In Leibniz’s philosophy the units of things which we 
call atoms are called Monads.!_ They are psychical, not material; 
they are little perceptions, but sometimes dim and confused. In 
the human soul we have a Monad which has developed to the 
stage of clear and conscious perception or representation. 

Many of the modern panpsychic or mind-stuff theories go back 
to Leibniz. W. K. Clifford proposed the view that the whole 

1 See above, p. 243, 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 273 


Universe is made of mind-stuff, an ultimate cosmic reality, and 
that our human consciousness is built up from elementary feel- 
ings, and these from mind-stuff.!_ James in one of his later writ- 
ings 2 thought it might be necessary to assume the presence in 
the Universe of a kind of reservoir of soul-stuff, ‘a continuum 
of cosmic consciousness.” James Ward in England, C. A. 
Strong in America, and Friedrich Paulsen in Germany have up- 
held various forms of Panpsychism, in which the very ground of 
the world is mind or feeling or consciousness, the body and 
the brain being appearances or phenomena of this essential 
psychical reality. 


Double-aspect theories 

According to this fourth view, mind and body are simply two 
aspects of the same underlying reality, itself possibly unknown. 
They are not different things at all, but identical in essence. 
They are the same realities seen from different sides; two faces, 
- as.it were, of the same coin. As stated in its original form by 
Spinoza, the one substance, which is called God, has two attri- 
butes, thought and extension. Jn its modern form, as stated, for 
instance, by Warren, “‘conscious and neural phenomena consti- 
tute one single series of events,” their different appearance being 
due to different ways of observing them.’ 

Fechner’s theory, mentioned in a previous chapter, was quite 
similar. But in Fechner it takes rather the form of ascribing 
to all matter a kind of elementary consciousness. The whole 
world is ensouled. Everything has a soul — minute particles of 
matter, organic bodies, the planets, the whole Universe. This 
has been a favorite view with many modern thinkers. Even 
Haeckel said that the material atoms are not dead and inert, but 
are endowed with feeling and will. 


Newer views 
We have thus passed in briefest review the four principal 
classes of theories about the mind held during the nineteenth 


1 Lectures and Essays, vol. 1. 2 American Magazine, 1909, p. 588. 
3 Howard C. Warren, Human Psychology, p.415. Titchener holds a similar view. 


Q74 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


century. In one or another form they are still generally held. 
But now in recent years quite new views are appearing. The 
Freudians, the Pragmatists, the Behaviorists, the Neo-Realists, 
and the Energists have taken up the problem with a freshness 
and enthusiasm that promise real contributions to the philosophy 
of mind, especially since these various movements have much in 
common. Before considering these new views on the problem of 
mind, we should notice certain general tendencies already appar- 
ent in the nineteenth century. Even then the foundations were 
laid in experimental and empirical psychology for a philosophy of 
mind which should be more in keeping with our inductive scien- 
tific methods. The critical work done by Hume could never be 
forgotten, in spite of the rather convincing answer of Immanuel 
Kant. It became, therefore, more and more the custom to speak 
of mental states rather than of the mind and its “faculties.” 
Psychologists devoted themselves to the study of sensation, per- 
ception, memory, feeling, volition. What is given in experience 
is not a mind or soul, but a stream of thought. The use of the 
word soul was looked upon with suspicion; it disappeared finally 
from the language of psychologists. Even the word mind was 
distrusted, and when used often signified no more than the sum 


of our mental states. Psychology was defined sometimes as the 


science of mental states. 

Still, however, the mind was often looked upon as a sort of re- 
ceptacle in which all these mental states were held, or as a sort 
of stage upon which they appeared and disappeared. ‘This no- 
tion of the mind was hardly more satisfactory than the old psy- 
chology of ideas, encouraged by Locke, based on the assumption 
that there are a lot of entities called zdeas which exist in the mind 
and may pass out of the mind and be again recalled as memories. 

Gradually this structural psychology yielded to a functional 
view; mental activities took the place of mental states. Mental 
activities could be subjected to experimental investigation — 
actually studied in the laboratory. One thing, however, all these 
activities seemed to have in common; they were conscious. 
Thus, the word consciousness came into general use to take 


the place of the word soul and mind, which were under sus- 


= ——— 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 275 


picion because of their metaphysical associations; and psychol- 
ogy was sometimes defined as the science of consciousness. I 
may not bea soul, or a mind, or even a body, but at any rate Iam 
conscious; and consciousness seemed to be a safe term, which 
should take the place of the discarded soul. But really it was a 
very unfortunate term, and its extensive use has introduced end- 
less confusion into our modern philosophy of mind. Finally, 
James himself called it in question and raised the inquiry whether 
consciousness exists at all. In fact, he said that it does not exist 
as areal thing, being but the faint rumor of the disappearing soul. 

The influence of the rising Freudian psychology, which makes 
so much of unconscious mental activity, tended also to discour- 
age the use of the word consciousness as synonymous with mind. 
So also did the new science of Behaviorism, which proceeded un- 
dismayed to construct the whole science of psychology without 
any reference to consciousness at all. Whether either the Freud- 
ians or the Behaviorists are right in their attitude toward con- 
- sciousness, we may learn later; here it is only necessary to take 
notice of the passing of that stage in the history of the philosophy 
of mind in which mind was identified with consciousness. Very 
often consciousness was thought of as a kind of stuff, much as 
mind and soul had formerly been conceived. McDougall speaks 
of the havoc wrought in psychology by the word consciousness, 
and says that it is a thoroughly bad word, and that it has been 
a great misfortune for psychology that the word has come into 
general use. In the next chapter we shall try to find out what 
the word consciousness really means. 


Objective methods 

Meanwhile actual reconstructive work was being done by the 
new schools mentioned above. What is common to all these 
new movements is that they begin by studying man as a member 
of the biological series, who acts or behaves in a certain way, and 
who has certain kinds of experience; and the question is to what 
kind of action or behavior we may give the name mental; and fur- 
ther what presuppositions are necessary to account for that par- 

1 Outline of Psychology, p. 16, 


276 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


ticular kind of behavior which we call mental. Consequently 
the study of mind has become objective. The old method of in- 
trospection, while not wholly discarded, is held in abeyance, if 
not under suspicion. The method of general observation has 
largely taken its place; not because this method is certainly ade- 
quate in the study of mind, but because it is the method success- 
fully pursued by the other sciences, and because, at any rate, so 
far as 7vé goes, its results can be trusted. This objective method 
taken in connection with the verified results of all related sciences, 
such as biology, physiology, genetics, abnormal psychology, and 
anthropology, promises decided contributions to the philosophy 
of mind. 

This new psychology begins with a study, not of minds, souls, 
consciousness, ideas, or sensations, but of mental processes in 
general. What kind of processes shall we call mental? We ob- 
serve mechanical processes in the interaction of the parts of a 
machine. We observe chemical processes in atomic interchanges 
in gases, liquids, and solids. When we come to the simplest or- 
ganism, we find other processes, which have to do with main- 
taining the integrity of the organism itself; for instance, growth 
and reproduction. These we call vital processes. But now we 
may distinguish processes of still another kind, when an organism 
begins to respond as a unit to an outer situation in such a way 
as to maintain its integrity. Behavior is a word which we apply 
to activities of this kind; it signifies the manner in which an or- 
ganism functions with reference to its environment. We may 
then give the name mental processes to all those activities of 
an individual organism in which it adapts itself to a changing 
environment in such a way as to conserve or promote its well- 
being, its interests. In a simple reflex action there is stimulus 
and response. The response is purposive, conducive to the wel- 
fare of the organism; but it is relatively determined and invari- 
able; there is no specific response, no selection or choice or con- 
trol. Itisnot mental. Next come instincts, where reflex actions 
are further integrated, resulting in inherited tendencies to carry 
out a given set of responses under given circumstances. Such 
actions, only slightly adaptive, we hesitate to call mental, re- 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 277 


serving the latter term for those specific responses by which on 
the basis of previous experience a new situation has been dealt 
with in such a way as to conserve or advance the interests of the 
organism. Responses like these are called intelligent or mental. 

Now, something like this is the groundwork of the new phi- 
‘losophy of mind. We notice that it rests upon simple, direct ob- 
servation of the behavior of individuals, and is fortified by a 
more or less complete knowledge not only of the brain and the 
neural mechanism, but of the whole body. Psychology, thus, is 
not the science of the soul or mind or consciousness, but the 
study of behavior, involving stimulus and response. In the 
case of man these reflexes become very highly organized and 
integrated and conditioned by previous reactions and accom- 
panied by various checks and inhibitions; so we arrive at that 
kind of activity, behavior, or conduct, which we call reflective, 
intelligent, mental. Even what we call thought may be consid- 
ered as a ‘‘motor setting,” or “latent course of action.’ ! 


Behaviorism 

The method we have just described is the general method of 
approach of the science of Behaviorism, which studies in a wholly 
objective way the conduct or behavior of living beings, and con- 
siders human psychology to have just this behavior of men as its 
subject-matter.? . 

As one method of advancing the science of psychology free 
from doubtful assumptions, Behaviorism must command our 
highest respect; but it can make no lawful claim to furnishing a 
philosophy of mind. If what we desire is a philosophy of mind, 
consciousness cannot be ignored, as the Behaviorist elects to do. 
The word consciousness is in daily use and means something; and 
it behooves us to find out what it means. Furthermore, since so 
much is made of organization and integration of reflexes, the 


1 See Edwin B. Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, p. 98. In the 
first two chapters of this little book the reader will find the clearest account of this 
way of regarding the mind. 

2 The behavioristic standpoint may best be understood by reading John B. 
Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorisit, or Max F. Meyer’s 
Psychology of the Other-One. 


278 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


source and secret of this organization must be studied. Behav- 
iorism, of course, ignores all such questions. Still further, since 
organisms in specific response act in such a way as to conserve. 
their well-being, or to bring themselves into a satisfied relation 
to the environment, psychology should inquire what these inter- 
ests and satisfactions are; at any rate, they cannot be omitted in 
the philosophy of mind. 

The movement known as Neo-Realism differs little in its psy- 
chological attitude from Behaviorism; only the Neo-Realists are 
philosophers rather than psychologists and are primarily inter- 
ested in the problem of knowledge. Incidentally, they have 
worked out a philosophy of mind more complete than that at- 
tempted by the Behaviorists. The general approach to the study 
of mind which I have described as characteristic of the new 
schools is especially the attitude of the Neo-Realists; that is, the 
approach to the study of adaptive behavior through the objec- 
tive study of organisms. Reflexes are progressively organized 
into more and more complex processes producing synthetic nov- 
elties, till finally adaptive behavior, or specific response, accom- 
panied by awareness signals the birth of ‘‘mind.” } 

This philosophy of mind takes a slightly different form in 
an instructive chapter by Ralph Barton Perry in his Present 
Philosophical Tendencies. Perry distinguishes three parts of 
mind. First, the biological interests; second, a nervous system 
acting as instrument of the biological processes; third, those 
parts of the environment to which the nervous system specifi- 
cally responds — the so-called ‘‘mental contents.”’ ? 

This seems confusing at first, but becomes clearer when we 
understand that it is nothing but Behaviorism (with a saving 
emphasis, however, upon the biological interests), considering the 
mind quite materialistically as the brain in its selective and con- 
trolling aspects. But Perry and Holt, following James, con- 
ceived the brilliant idea of regarding as actual parts of the mind 
those portions of the environment to which the organism spe- 
cifically responds, the mental contents, as they are called. Then 


1 Compare Edwin B. Holt, op. cit., pp. 51 ff. 
2 Chap. xu, ‘‘A Realistic Theory of Mind.” 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 279 


that other part of the environment to which there is no specific 
response by the organism may be called physical. So that it de- 
pends upon the context into which otherwise neutral entities get 
whether we shall regard them as physical or mental, the real 
world being neutral. Thus the doctrine of ‘‘ Neutral Monism”’ 
appears on the scene. What would have been considered a de- 
cided Materialism at the time when James wrote is thus con- 
verted into an innocent Neutral Monism. But I would advise 
the confused reader to neglect this third division of the mind 
which the Neo-Realists offer and cling to the other two, namely, 
the biological interests and adaptive behavior. Whether this 
really does lead to any kind of Materialism we may consider 
later. 

The most serious difficulty with the neo-realistic doctrine of 
mind is its failure to give us a clear notion of what consciousness 
is. Although Perry admits that ‘‘mind as observed introspec- 
tively differs characteristically from mind as observed in nature 
and society,’ nevertheless, one gets the impression that neither in 
Behaviorism nor in Neo-Realism does the subjective side of men- 
tality get its proper recognition. Howard C. Warren, in his book 
entitled Human Psychology, outlines a philosophy of mind which 
seems to correct this deficiency, while giving full recognition to 
the objective method of study. Psychology, he says, is a science 
concerned, not merely with behavior — that is, with those com- 
plex processes by means of which an organism adjusts itself to 
the environment — but also with the subjective aspect of all these 
processes. They are not only adaptive processes as seen by 
another; they are also conscious phenomena, as seen by ourselves. 
By means of self-observation we get a new way of studying these 
adaptive processes. In addition to mentality there is also con- 
sciousness. Consciousness is the way all these mental processes 
appear to ourselves. 

At first sight this seems to clear up the whole matter and give 
us a clear philosophy of mind. It uses the modern approach by 
studying in an objective manner that kind of activity in organic 
beings which we call behavior; but it also admits that all these 
adaptive — that is, mental — processes have a subjective or 


280 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


conscious aspect, a tremendously interesting and significant part 
of the life of man, thus supplementing the deficiencies of Behav 
iorism. | 

But still the question arises, What 7s this conscious subjective 
life? Is it anything that can find a place in the field of science? 
Is it a kind of by-product of the brain, an epiphenomenon? Or 
are we to fall back into some ancient Dualism after all? It was 
just to escape all such haziness that Behaviorism and Neo-Real- 
ism took their stand upon objective behavior. 

To these questions Warren says that the experiences which 
we observe in ourselves might be considered as a new set of occur- 
rences. ‘That would lead to a theory of psycho-physical parallel- 
ism with all its mysteries; or they might be considered as another 
way of looking at the same set of facts. This would lead to the 
double-aspect theory, which Warren adopts. Neural events, 
according to this view, are observable either as behavior in others 
or as our Own experiences in ourselves. A merely objective study 
of mentality in others would furnish a very important and very 
true science of psychology; but it would, after all, be a partial 
view, for our inner life of conscious experience presents another 
side of the reality, supplementing that of outward behavior.! 

The philosophy of mind thus clearly presented by Warren 
seems a distinct advance upon Behaviorism. Surely, the reader 
will say, there is something more than behavior, something more 
than mentality, if we are to call adaptive behavior mental. There 
is certainly an inner conscious life of experience — my own life 
of personal wishes, dreams, memories, volitions, and perceptions. 
This is true enough, but just what it means to say that neural 
events and brain events can be ‘‘ viewed” in two ways is not so 
clear. It still remains to ask whether a better way of explaining 
consciousness than this double-aspect theory may be advanced. 


Pragmatism 
Another new and vital movement in the study of mind is 
Pragmatism. As a system of philosophy we shall consider this 
in another chapter; but what of the Pragmatist’s philosophy of 
1 Op. cit., pp. 9, 10, and 415. 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 281 


mind? The pragmatic approach to the mind problem is even 
more biological and evolutionary than the other new movements. 
We start with an organism, an animal or a man that has a prac- 
tical problem to solve, perhaps to get food, perhaps to escape an 
enemy. Hence arises a situation, a problem to be dealt with; 
the environment is to be moulded to the needs of the subject. 
This involves experimentation; and what we have to do with, 
therefore, is the experience of the subject in this experimental 
moulding of the environment. Now, there is a certain stage in 
this experience, when it becomes reflective and intelligent, that 
we may describe as mental or conscious. 

Pragmatists do not care to speak much of the mind, still less 
of the soul, and not so very much of consciousness. Conse- 
quently the pragmatic theory of mind is somewhat hard to for- 
mulate.t Perhaps we may put it in the following way. In the 
development of organisms there is a stage prior to that of reflec- 
tion; it is characterized by mere liking or disliking, striving, en- 
-deavor, and is determined by definitely organized systems of 
neural discharge. In the next stage incompatible factors arise 
in some definite situation; conflicting stimuli indicate conflicting 
ways of response; there is trouble, tension, a perplexing situation. 
Hence arises the necessity for readjustment. The new situation 
has to be integrated; the response has to be adapted to the new 
situation. Experimentation follows, and selection; conduct is 
to be controlled by its consequences; future consequences become 
transformed into a stimulus for behavior. Now, such adaptive 
behavior is called reflective, conscious, mental. 'The mind, there- 
fore, is instrumental, serving biological ends; and Pragmatism of 
this kind is sometimes called Instrumentalism. | 

In its initial emphasis upon adaptive behavior, therefore, we 
see that the pragmatic approach to the mind problem differs but 
little from the other modern movements; but the special em- 
phasis is upon the moulding and remodeling of the environment 

1 The clearest account will be found in the volume entitled Creative Intelli- 
gence, particularly in the chapter by John Dewey entitled ‘‘The Need for a Re- 
covery of Philosophy,’ and a chapter by Boyd H. Bode entitled ‘‘ Consciousness 


and Psychology.’”’ Compare also Dewey’s book Essays in Experimental Logic, 
pp. 8 ff. 


282 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


through the creative activity of the individual. Intelligence is 
the name which the Pragmatists prefer for activity of this kind 
and they speak of ‘‘creative intelligence,” and of ‘the coura- 
geously inventive individual as bearer of a creatively employed 
mind,” and of the future as being determined by intelligence. 

What we get in Pragmatism, therefore, is a stirring picture of 
free dynamic personalities, striving, struggling, achieving. But 
since the Pragmatists make much of evolution and the biological 
approach, one is curious to know just how intelligence stands to 
the rest of the evolutionary process; whether we have a mechan- 
istic or non-mechanistic philosophy of mind. The implications 
of Pragmatism are all quite non-mechanistic. The insistence 
upon experience, upon free dynamic personalities, upon creative 
intelligence, do not lead in a mechanistic direction. 

On the other hand, there is expressly repudiated any belief in 
a distinctive psychic element in experience; that is, anything out- 
side the sphere of physical and biological factors. Pragmatists 
have no use for minds or souls or consciousness in the old sub- 
stantive sense. So the question arises, just what zs this creative 
intelligence that is creative of values? In Pragmatism it seems 
just to appear on the scene, like a little cloud gathering in the 
clear sky, and we wonder what it is made of; we would like to 
see its credentials. 

The same is true of the non-reflectional elements of experience, 
the esteem, aversion, suffering, endeavor, and revolt, of which 
Dewey speaks, as preceding reflection. Whence come they 
and what are they? Probably what the Pragmatists mean is 
that these non-reflectional elements cf experience are what we 
commonly call the biological interests — impulse, craving, will- 
to-live, desire. Wherever there is life, these deep impulses are 
present; and intelligence is just a tool or instrument of these in- 
terests. But whence, then, come the freedom and creative 
power of intelligence? From the standpoint of biological evolu- 
tion where do freedom and creative activity come in? ! 


1 The difficulties here referred to have been pointed out in a clear manner 
by Arthur O. Lovejoy in three articles in Jour. of Phil., Psych. and Sci. Meth., 
vol. 17 (1920), pp. 589, 622, and vol. 19 (1921), p. 5. 





THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 283 


However the Pragmatists may solve this difficulty, their 
wholesome insistence on the creative power, efficacy, and effi- 
ciency of intelligence is worthy of careful note. 


That man is a real agent — and that the distinctive quality of his 
agency consists in the part played therein by the imaginative recovery 
and analysis of a physically non-existent past and the imaginative 
prevision of a physically non-existent future — these are the first arti- 
cles of any consistently pragmatic creed. Such a creed is simply a re- 
turn to sanity; for these two theses are the common and constant pre- 
suppositions of the entire business of life. Never, surely, did a sillier 
or more self-stultifying idea enter the human mind, than the idea that 
thinking as such — that is to say, remembering, planning, reasoning, 
forecasting — is a vast irrelevancy, having no part in the causation of 
man’s behavior or in the shaping of his fortunes —a mysterious re- 
dundancy in a cosmos which would follow precisely the same course 
without it. Nobody at a moment of reflective action, it may be sus- 
pected, ever believed this to be true.} 


The Freudians 

What is the mind? With our question still unanswered, let 
us go to the Freudians. None of the new ways of looking at the 
mind is more vital and revolutionary than theirs. This school 
recognizes what should have been seen long ago, that philoso- 
phers and psychologists, being men in whom the rational and 
conscious part of the mind is highly developed, have a tendency 
to overemphasize- these elements. Consequently it is a very one- 
sided philosophy of mind that we find in the older traditions 
and the regular textbooks. Really the irrational and uncon- 
scious mental elements are the more important. 

So the Freudians have discovered that the mind is not a col- 
lection of sensations, perceptions, ideas, and rational processes, 
or a certain spiritual substance having ideas, sensations, and the 
like; but rather a deep and troubled sea, whose secrets are found, 
not in its placid surface of consciousness and reason, but in its 
profound unconscious and irrational depths. They have laid 
hold of two great truths. One is that mind is a much wider term 


1 Arthur O. Lovejoy, loc. ctt., p. 632. This doctrine of the Pragmatists Lovejoy 
endorses while pointing out its inconsistency with their metaphysics. 


984 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


than consciousness; the other is that the most significant things 
in our mental life are impulses. Night-dreams and day-dreams 
made in the old psychology quite an insignificant chapter; here 
they are of prime importance, for they reveal the deep springs of 
our mental life — those profound psychical energies which are 
known as impulses, cravings, desires, wishes, appetites, and in- 
terests; such, for instance, as sex, hunger, self-preservation, gre- 
gariousness. In our conventional, civilized life these vital striv- 
ings are necessarily repressed. Hence come unhappy ‘‘com- 
plexes,”’ systems of painful experiences, lying below the threshold 
of consciousness, upwelling into our conscious life under the in- 
fluence of emotion.! 

Now, all this is very interesting, very important, and probably 
true. It is a new psychology, but is it a philosophy of mind? 
We are introduced to a lot of new terms — the Unconscious, 
Psychical Energy,? the Censor, Complexes, and others, and we 
are curious to know what they are and how they are going to be 
built up into a real philosophy of mind. What is this Psy- 
chical Energy, and how is it related to other well-authenticated 
forms of energy? We shall turn the pages of the Freudians 
and Psychoanalysts in vain for any clear answer to this ques- 
tion. The Unconscious, Psychical Energy, the Censor, are 
concepts, mental constructs, which serve the purpose of all 
conceptual construction, as a framework on which to hang our 
actual facts. If such things exist — say a reservoir of uncon- 
scious impressions — then the facts would be as they are. They 
have the same logical credentials as the soul had in former 
times. If the soul exists and has ‘‘faculties,’”’ then facts should 
follow as they do. 

Tansley in his exposition of the Freudian psychology traces 
the evolution of mind, quite after the manner of the other new 
schools, through simple reflex action and instinctive behavy- 
ior to the final stage of reflective thought and consciously pur- 

1 An intelligible account of the Freudian philosophy of mind may be found in 
Tansley’s The New Psychology. Compare also Brill’s Fundamental Conceptions 
’ of Psychoanalysis, and Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and his General 


Introduction to Psychoanalysis. 
2 Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, pp. 144 ff. Tansley, op. cit., pp. 59 ff. 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 285 


posive action. But when mind does arrive, it is something suz 
generis, something wholly distinct from the body and brain. 
“In short,” he says, ‘‘we cannot dispense with the dualism in- 
volved in regarding mind as an entity with its own phenomena 
and laws.” ! 
The Energists 

Reference should be made to a final theory of mind, which at 
first thought is quite captivating. It is the theory that mind is 
a peculiar form of energy to be added to our list of physical 
energies, such as we assume to exist in nature. I have already 
referred to Macfarlane’s theory that we must assume in addition 
to molic, thermic, electric, and other physical energies also a 
vital energy called biotic, and certain psychic energies which he 
calls cognitic and cogitic. And we have seen that some of the 
Freudians speak of psychic energy. Ostwald and his school in 
Germany have for a long time preached the doctrine that mind 
is a form of energy. 

That there are profound energies involved in the development 
and behavior of animals and men, no one doubts. Ina preceding 
chapter, when we were studying the nature and origin of life, we 
have seen how fundamental these creative energies are, if we are 
to understand either life itself or its evolution; but Energism in 
the above forms fails to take account of the complexity of the 
activities and capacities which are included under the term men- 
tal. It is too easy a solution of the mind problem.? 


1A. G. Tansley, The New Psychology, pp. 20, 21. 

2 These theories of Energism should not be confused with the thoughtful 
hypothesis developed by W. P. Montague, that consciousness is a form of poten- 
tial physical energy; that is, a potential physica! energy of brain currents. Com- 
pare his article in Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Sct. Meth., vol. tv, p. 374, entitled 
“Contemporary Realism and the Problem of Perception,”’ and his chapter in 
The New Realism entitled ‘‘The Realistic Theory of Truth and Error.’’ Also, 
Monist, xvi, pp. 21 ff. Also, Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of 
William James, pp. 105 ff. 

But if I understand Montague, his theory is, after all, a kind of double-aspect 
theory. Mind is not explained; it is only stated that it is the inner side of what 
we know objectively as potential energy. He says that ‘‘what we know directly 
from within as the psychical or subjective side of experience may be the same as 
what we know indirectly from without as the potential energy of the nerve cur- 
rents in the brain.”” (Monist, vol. xv1u, p. 27.) 


286 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Summary. : 

These, then, are some of the more important theories of mind 
familiar in the history of philosophy. Whether out of them 
all any clear philosophy of mind will emerge we may inquire 
in the next chapter. Surely they are confusing at first; but 
the thoughtful reader will see that they do in some measure 
converge toward certain definite results. There are some things 
in this history of theories of the mind which seem like saving 
truths to be followed up and carefully weighed. One of these is 
the Freudian emphasis upon vital impulses, those deep biological 
interests which seem like psychical energies driving us on appar- 
ently with some unconscious purpose. Another is the view com- 
mon to all the new movements, that the key to what we call 
mental activity is, objectively considered, that kind of behavior 
which we call adaptive. Another, pointed out by Warren, is 
the belief that adaptive behavior has a subjective side which we 
may call consciousness or experience. Still another, emphasized 
by Plato, is the peculiar unitary personal character of the Self. 
Finally, there is that strange conception of Aristotle’s that the 
mind is the perfection and fruition of the body. Would it be 
possible to forge all these elements into a consistent philosophy 
of mind? 


In connection with this chapter read: 
William McDougall, Body and Mind (Methuen and Company), chaps. 
I to IX. 


Further references: 
L. T. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution. (The Macmillan Company.) 


Hume, ‘‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” as found in 
Rand’s Modern Philosophers, pp. 307-46. 


Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (The Mac- 
millan Company), chaps. Iv, v, vi. Also her Introduction to Psychology. 


Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. (The Macmillan Company). And 
his Creative Evolution. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


Friedrich Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Frank 
Thilly (Henry Holt and Company), pp. 74-144. 


C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body. (The Macmillan Company.) 


THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— HISTORICAL 287 


And his later work, The Origin of Consciousness. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 


Howard C. Warren, Human Psychology. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 


John B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. 
(J. B. Lippincott Company.) 

James Ward, “Psychology,” in Hncyc. Brit., 9th ed., and his Psychological 
Principles. (Cambridge University Press.) 

Edwin B. Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics (Henry Holt 


and Company), chaps. 1, u. And his The Concept of Consciousness. 
(The Macmillan Company.) 


CHAPTER XVII 
THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUL 


RECONSTRUCTIVE 


One of the causes of the confusion about the soul which is 
seen in the history of philosophy is found in the exceedingly 
complex character of the human organism and the many kinds 
of activities embraced under the term mental or psychical. We 
may as well recognize at once that the mind is a very complex 
thing, or group of things, or rather a group of tendencies, pro- 
cesses, and activities. We must distinguish three aspects of 
the mind and examine them separately. : 


1. The Conative Tendencies 


Any true philosophy of mind must begin with the springs of 
conduct and behavior. In the recent literature of the subject it 
has been customary to speak of these as primary biological in- 
terests.. Usually they have been treated descriptively in sepa- 
rate chapters under the head of deszres, instincts, will, or conative 
tendencies, as if they were normal features of our conscious life 
to be described in passing, along with other mental processes. 

But we must understand that they are in a wholly different 
category; they are tendencies and dispositions rather than activ- 
ities and processes. Just in proportion as psychology now em- 
phasizes activity, behavior, function, doing, just so much more 
is it necessary to understand the springs or grounds of this doing. 
Deep down in the roots of our being there is a force at work 
which impels, and what we call behavior is the result of the opera- 
tion of this force. We may call it conation, striving, wish, will, 
libido, appetite, hunger, sex, desire, craving, instinct, psychic 
energy, or just a kind of drive. In the last chapter, when we 
were studying the new movements in psychology, we noticed 
the prominence given to these profound conative elements, 
the non-reflectional elements of experience, as the Pragmatists 
call them. ‘The Freudian psychology owes its vigor largely 


f 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 289 


to the emphasis which it gives to these primary constitutive 
elements of the mind, the wishes. Plato and Aristotle were evi- 
dently impressed by the basal character of these elements, for 
they spoke of an appetitive soul and a vegetative soul. McDou- 
gall has shown at length that the instincts are the prime movers 
of all human activity and that human and animal behavior is a 
manifestation of this purposive or hormic energy.! 


The conative tendencies as interests 
It is doubtful whether the term energy, even when qualified as 

purposeful or “hormic,”’ is the best name for these primary men- 
tal elements. What we have is something more than a drive, 
something more than a drift or a tendency or a restlessness, even 
something more than what one writer has called the ‘‘energy- 
influences seething and bubbling in the organism’’;? it is rather 
an interest. Wherever there are organisms there are interests. 
Life is purposive, looking toward self-maintenance.and self-per- 
petuation. This, as we have seen, does not necessarily involve 
any general teleology, or any conscious purposiveness in the 
world. It is only that life itself is teleological.? It tends to self- 
maintenance in growth and assimilation, and to self-perpetuation 
in simple cell division. It exhibits what Patten calls a kind of 
egoism and altruism.‘ This impulse of self-preservation and 
self-perpetuation is native to every organism; perhaps there is no 
better name for it than the will-to-live. 

Every clod feels a stir of might, 

An instinct within it that reaches and towers; 


And grasping blindly above it for light, 
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers. 


“The Greek naturalists saw (what it needs only sanity to see) 
that the infinite substance of things was instinct with a perpetual 
motion and rhythmic order which were its life, and that the spirit 
of man was a spark from that universal fire.’’ 5 


1 See his Outlines of Psychology, pp. 72, 213, et passim, and his Introduction to 
Social Psychology. 

2 Louis Berman, in his Glands Regulating Personality, p. 196. 

3 See above, pp. 153-156. 4 See above, p. 138. 

5 Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, p. 212. 


290 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Thus far we seem to be on solid empirical ground in our search 
for the soul. We have found at the roots of our mental life deep 
springs of action in the form of native impulses, instincts, or pro- 
pensities. They well up in our conscious life, suffused with emo- 
tional tone, not merely as desires and appetites, but also as vague 
longings, aspirations, hopes, and ambitions; so that they become 
the springs of progress as well as the fountain of our love-life, our 
. social life, our economic life. They are the power behind the 
throne in it all. 

Before we go on to consider other elements of the mind, such 
as behavior, intelligence, memory, feeling, and perception, or to 
inquire about consciousness or personality, it may be well to 
delay a little longer upon these basal elements, to see what their 
connection is forward and backward; that is, forward to their 
products in the complex self, and backward to their metaphysical 
sources. This, to be sure, would not be necessary, if our goal 
were simply to find out what the mind is; for it would be suffi- 
cient to point out the actual presence of these deep impulsive 
strivings in that total thing we call the mind. Then we could go 
on to discuss the other elements, such as adaptive behavior, in- 
telligence, and personality — and we should perhaps be able to 
say what the mind7zs. Buta philosophy of mind must try to do 
more than this; it must try if possible to find the significance 
of impulse and striving in the evolutionary process, in animal 
life, in the whole world. It must even inquire whether all the 
later mental processes may not be instruments of these vital 
strivings. 


The conative tendencies as cosmic agencies 

In previous chapters when we were studying the origin and 
nature of life, the philosophy of evolution, and the purposive 
world, we discovered the presence in nature of some sort of 
agency which makes evolution creative. To this agency many 
names have been given by various philosophers, such as the élan 
vital, the evolutionary urge, the life-force, the organizing power, a 
common creative agency, an internal perfecting principle. Some- 
times these terms were applied only to the world of organic 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 291 


beings — sometimes, as in the case of Henderson,! the drift or 
tendency was carried farther back to inorganic matter. Here, of 
course, we are on speculative ground and no such cosmic prin- 
ciples are necessary to establish a philosophy of mind; but cer- 
tainly it is very tempting to think of the creative forces of the 
mind as a part of, or related to, the creative forces of the world, 
and perhaps the driving forces, not only in evolutionary change, 
but in social and moral progress. 

Bergson has developed this thought in his own way. He calls 
it mind-energy, or vital impetus. In one striking passage he 
says, ‘‘It is to social life that evolution leads, as though the need 
of it was felt from the beginning, or rather as though there were 
some original and essential aspiration of life, which could find full 
satisfaction only in society.” 2 

I wonder whether this driving force of mind-energy is looking 
forward not only to society and history, but to intellect, reason, 
personality, individuality, and freedom. We know that intelli- 
- gence is creative; we see its creative power every day in art and 
literature, in science and invention, in commercial enterprise and 
business organization. Does it owe its creative power to the 
purposive energy which lies at the roots of all megtal life? When 
we come to the study of intelligence and of adaptive behavior, we 
shall see that they depend upon the organization or integration 
of neural processes. If we are to explain these in this way, or ex- 
plain attention and other higher mental processes as the ‘‘total 
integration of reaction-ares,”’ what is the integrating agency? In 
psychology now we do not speak primarily of mind; we speak of 
an organism which receives stimuli and reacts. Certain kinds of 
activities are now called mental. We think of the brain and the 
nervous system as instruments for more and more perfect adap- 
tation to the environment. We know what they are instru- 
ments for, but what are they instruments of? Apparently of 
the biological interests, of ‘‘the energy-influences seething and 
bubbling in the organism.”’ 


1 See above, pp. 156-58. 
2 Mind-Energy. Lectures and Essays. Trans. by H. Wildon Carr, p. 33. 
The italics are mine. 


292 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Driving forces or aspirations? 

But now before we leave this part of the subject, a curious 
question comes up, a question that has confronted us in former 
chapters and will haunt us to the end, the question of push or 
pull. How shall we really interpret the biological interests? 
Shall we interpret them as purposive energy, as driving force, or 
as cravings? The phrase driving force is a telling phrase and fits 
in with the dynamic philosophy of the day. It means the opera- 
tion of a force working from behind, and so we go back in a vain 
quest for the initial push, and get no rest until we arbitrarily 
stop at some original creative power, or God. The phrase pur- 
posive energy seems a little better. It has the forward look — 
suggests the quest, the search, the striving; and yet I wonder 
whether the word energy is the word we want here. If the world 
is an overflowing, outpouring, productive process endlessly crea- 
tive of new values in the pragmatic sense, then the phrase is 
correctly descriptive of the reality in question. 

But it is Just possible that the word craving, or the word znterest, 
is the best of all. Is God the creative power back of us, or the 
ideal which is drawing us on? Are the higher values the out- 
come of a productive process, or are they limits toward which we 
are ever approaching — the “beauty-in-itself,” the ‘‘good-in- 
itself,” which Plato never tired of telling us about? Possibly 
the simplest organism is znterested in self-maintenance and self- 
perpetuation, just because life itself is good; possibly we are 
interested in thinking and reasoning and in esthetic production 
and in social justice, just because thought and reason and beauty 
and justice are good — are values; possibly our biological inter- 
ests are forms of hunger — but that kind of hunger which Berg- 
son calls aspiration, which we may call creative effort. It is 
perhaps only because of-the habits of thought acquired in an age 
of mechanism that the phrase driving force seems more apt than 
the words aspiration or appreciation. Perhaps the power behind 
the throne in our mental life is “‘a power that makes for right- 
eousness.”’ 

This all seems very metaphysical for a chapter on the philos- 
ophy of mind — and too speculative. Let the reader who so 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 293 


thinks forget these paragraphs and go back to the biological in- 
terests, which are obvious facts, and without which any philos- 
ophy of mind would be fatally lacking, and then let him meditate 
upon the word interest and formulate an explanation of his own. 
Perhaps the slightly different way this whole matter is put by 
Hobhouse will have a stronger appeal to most of us. He con- 
siders the world to be a process of development in which the 
principle of development is the principle of rational harmony or 
love. But the whole of reality is the entire process, in which 
the beginning is determined by the end as well as the end by the 
beginning. 


A process thus determining and determined by its own outcome is 
of the nature of Effort, and the world development must therefore fall 
under this category. . 

This Effort is the eeaior of gods and men, of beautiful fictions and of 
what is noble in fact, of law and morals, of science and art, perhaps of 
what is beautiful in nature, certainly of ‘the significance of that beauty 
_to us. Its operation is intelligent and purposive and all-embracing. 
An effort involving, even one evolving into, purpose implies Mind, and 
Mind that makes for harmony must have some unity throughout, how- 
ever rudimentary its achievement. Hence if the world-process is di- 
rected towards harmony we legitimately infer a Mind at its centre, but 
the form of unity which such a Mind possesses is less easily determined. 
It is possible that personality on the one hand and the social union of 
personalities on the other are rather its creations than adequate ex- 
pressions of its substantive essence.! 


If this be true, then that part of the mind which we call 
impulse is related, not only to that which we call the bzolog- 
ical interests in the whole organic kingdom, but related also 
at the same time to a world-principle which Hobhouse calls 
Effort; and then possibly, as he suggests in the last sentence, 
personality and human society are creations of this universal 
cosmic Effort. Personality, then, might be a kind of world goal, 
for the attaining of which the human brain and the intelligence 
springing therefrom might be instruments. 

11. T. Hobhouse, The Rational Good (Geo. Allen and Unwin), pp. 229, 230. 


294 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


II. Mental Processes 


But now we are ready to take our next step in the philosophy 
of mind. Let us keep steadily in view, however, that the mind 
is a very complex thing, inclusive not only of what we commonly 
call mental or intellectual processes, but also fundamental pro- 
clivities, interests, or impulses. These latter we have been 
studying; now let us go on to the distinctively mental processes 
sometimes included under the general term intelligence. 

Here we could follow the method of the new schools, whose 
illuminating work in the philosophy of mind we have studied in 
the preceding chapter — the Pragmatists, the Behaviorists, and 
the Neo-Realists. We could begin with the study of the organ- 
ism possessing the properties of stimulus and response; and we 
could trace the evolution of mind from the simple reaction-are 
through tropisms and instincts to the first appearance of adap- 
tive behavior; and we could then show that this adaptive behavior 
is what we call mental. We could point out that what we mean 
by mind is a certain kind of behavior, namely, that which in- 
volves selective control and specific response; that mind is a cer- 
tain new capacity which an organism acquires as the result of 
higher and higher integration of vital processes, the capacity to 
respond as a unit to a new situation in such a way as to conserve 
and enhance its well-being. Thus far this would be the general 
behaviorist method of approach; and then we could supplement 
this objective and impersonal approach by going on to show that 
what we call behavior and mentality in others is, when lived through 
or experienced by ourselves, what we call consciousness or ex- 
perience. 

All this would be quite proper and, provided we did not leave 
out of account that very important part of the mind which we 
have just been studying, namely, the vital impulsive strivings or 
springs of behavior, would give us no doubt a sound and scien- 
tific philosophy of mind. ‘Then, indeed, if we wished, we could 
limit the narrower word mind to the second of these stages 
in psychical evolution — that is, to intelligence or adaptive be- 
havior — and apply the richer word soul to the whole group of 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 295 


impulses, activities, and relations which we differentiate as ; im- 
pulses, intelligence, and consciousness. 

But I think there is a better method of approach than this. 
It would seem to the reader to be too cold and theoretical and 
abstract; it would be too biological. When fully completed he 
might say, ‘‘This is all a very fine philosophy of mind, but it is 
not sufficiently empirical. A philosophy of mind ought to start 
with facts of more immediate experience, not necessarily with 
my own subjective experience, but with well-recognized forms 
of mental activity. It should start with thinking, feeling, 
willing, perceiving, remembering, reasoning — not with physio- 
logical things like reaction-ares and synapses and adaptive 
behavior. People don’t behave — they think and reason and 
remember and forget and love and hate.” 


The empirical approach 

Very well, then, suppose we begin more empirically with well- 
_ known mental facts, and then afterwards, perhaps, we can con- 
nect our results with the less known physiological facts. Sup- 
pose we address a question like this to any one, a college student, 
a, business man, a worker in the shops: “Are there such things’ 
as mental processes, and if so, mention some.’’ He will answer, 
“Why, yes, of course there are; there are such things as thinking, 
feeling, remembering, forgetting, loving, hating, having pain or 
pleasure.” Obviously such things as these exist and may be 
talked about, just as stocks and bonds, butter and cheese, roads 
and lanes, exist and may be talked about. So thinking and 
reasoning, recollecting and planning, liking and disliking exist, 
and, indeed, for the moment, it does not make any difference 
whether they are things or processes or relations or faculties or 
brain states or even secretions of the endocrine glands; they just 
exist and are very interesting. Neither does it make any great 
difference at present how we come to know them, whether by 
introspection or intuition or immediate feeling, or by Just watch- 
ing the behavior of other people; they exist just the same. They 
are real, and there is no other kind of reality so very real as these 
mental things. In the actual daily experience of men, the ultra- 


296 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


real things, so to speak, are not butter and cheese, wood and 
steel, dinners and dollars, but pleasures and pains, love and hate, 
fear and jealousy, desires, ambitions, decisions, passions, long- 
ings, regrets, sorrows and sins. Dollars would have no meaning 
were it not for desires. 

We have, then, made a good beginning in the study of the 
philosophy of mind; we have found that certain processes, such 
as we have named, have a very real existence and may be talked 
about and studied, that by common consent they are an in- 
teresting class of things, that they are usually called mental 
things, and are distinguished from physical things, such as 
houses and furniture and animal bodies. 

But what is there common to all these things, all these pro- 
cesses which we call mental? Well, objectively they appear to 
be forms of behavior of an organism, say an animal or person. 
They are all modes of reference of some subject to some object. 
They are attitudes of a subject toward some object. Some sub- 
ject, perhaps just an organism, is striving toward some object; 
some animal, perhaps, is pursuing or escaping from some other 
animal. Or possibly some subject is pleased at something, or 
pained at something, or holds a cognitive attitude toward some- 
thing — that is, knows it or recognizes it. In all of these three 
kinds of reference there is this common element, namely, the 
behavior of some subject to some object.! 

Objectively, therefore, these things or processes which we call 
mental are forms of behavior, attitudes of men or women or 
children, or perhaps of the higher animals; and let us for the pre- 
sent consider them only in this objective way, simply as a class 
of evident and undeniable facts in the drama of human history 
as it is played before us, or in the evolution of animal life. Of 
course, it will immediately occur to each of us to say that all this 
display of mental behavior in the world around has quite a dif- 
ferent aspect as it unfolds itself in one’s own inner consciousness, 
in one’s inner conscious life of experience, as one gets it through 
introspection. ‘This is no doubt true, but suppose, just as an ex- 
periment, we leave this side of mental life out of account for the 

1 Compare John Laird, Problems of the Self, chap. 11. 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 297 


present. Let us see if it is possible to construct a philosophy of 
mind on a strictly objective basis, as we would construct a phi- 
losophy of nature. The Behaviorist, who disregards conscious- 
ness and suspects the method of introspection, studies mental 
facts as objectively known; let us follow his method for a while. 
He too speaks of habits, instincts, emotions, illusions, dreams, 
thought, memory, fear, fatigue, imitation, and personality.! 

But the reader may interrupt at this point. ‘May it not 
be,” he asks, “‘that, after all, these mental facts or processes of 
mind, whose reality, interest, and importance I must admit, are 
nothing more than bodily attitudes, brain states, functions of the 
cortex or motor centers, or conditioned reflexes? ”’ 

Well, even if they had only an objective reference as bodily 
attitudes and no inner meaning as parts of my personal life, these 
processes would still be realities and they would still be mental 
realities. If you think of the consequences in the history of the 
world of such things as love and hate, ambition, avarice, remorse, 

thought, invention, reasoning, you will see that we are dealing 
with real things; if you were to try to express them in physical 
terms you would feel that you were not giving them their real 
names. 

Neither shall we get any nearer to the reality of the mental 
processes if we try to analyze them into simpler elements, such 
as mind-stuff, or the movements of atoms, molecules, or cells. 
Butter and cheese are very useful and desirable things. They 
do not lose any of their reality when it is discovered that they 
are combinations of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Butter and 
cheese do not need to hang their heads when they discover their 
composite nature and say, ‘‘We thought we were realities of 
intrinsic worth and now we find that we are nothing but a func- 
tion of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.” Ina case like this, the 
‘nothing but” contains a fallacy. The chemical elements are 
not the realities in butter and cheese; they are merely the mate- 
rials. The reality is in the form, in the organization, and in the 
qualities which are the outcome of the organization. 

If this fact is fully grasped, it will forever free us from the fear 


i Compare Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, Index. 


298 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


of any materialistic degradation of our mental life coming from 
the study of its material conditions. The things of our mental 
life are not material things or processes; they are spiritual, as we 
shall see later. What we have to remember is that, if we wish to 
speak of realty, there is nothing that is or can be more real than 
our mental life. The notion that it could be reduced to some- 
thing more real, such as matter, motion, mind-stuff, electrical 
charges, arises from a misapprehension. It is also due to a mis- 
understanding when mental processes are “‘explained”’ as func- 
tions of the body or brain, or reaction-ares, or synapses, or en- 
docrine glands. These are, no doubt, all real, and are useful 
elements of the situation, but, having helped us to complete the 
whole structural picture, they have served their purpose. They 
can take a back seat and keep quiet. They have been tran- 
scended. We have passed into the sphere of higher reality and 
greater worth. 

In mind we are in the very presence of reality. All such the- 
ories as are presented in materialism, naturalism, atomism, or 
even in psychism, which try to go back to some greater reality 
than that of the mental fact, or to penetrate by analysis down 
to the elements of reality, are misleading. Aristotle, with his 
notion of the mind as the form of the body, and of reality as 
attained through a process of development from the union of 
form and matter, the latter being merely potential reality, gives 
us a more faithful philosophy. 

Thus far we have learned at least one useful lesson. We have 
learned that mental processes, thoughts, feelings, fears, aspira- 
tions, pains, pleasures, decisions, cognitive states, are real things, 
abating nothing from reality, however much we wish to stress 
the word. ‘This is no small achievement; for suppose that with 
some psychologists we regard the mind merely as the sum of 
mental processes, a convenient term to express the totality of 
mental life, we have at any rate made some progress in attain- 
ing a philosophy of mind. 

And, indeed, it would seem that we have thus far made no un- 
lawful assumptions, any more than any scientist makes assump- 
tions in collecting his facts and materials. The most confirmed 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 299 


Behaviorist, as has been seen, uses the same terms in describing 
the facts that he is studying. Thought does not cease to-be a 
powerful factor in the world’s history merely because it is de- 
scribed as highly integrated bodily activity. That it is only 
integrated bodily activity is, as the Behaviorist freely admits,! an 
assumption. But if it be that, what of it? There would be no 
“degradation” or materialization of thought in so describing it. 
In introducing such concepts as vital activity, organization, 
structure, a high degree of integration, the Behaviorist is 
speaking of a new and wonderful set of realities, quite as “lofty” 
and as dignified as thought or emotion. Only it happens to be 
thought and emotion that we are speaking of. 


Personality 

But now another illuminating fact appears in the situation. 
Still clinging persistently to our objective method of study, let 
us consider what we mean by personality, the Self, the Ego. 
Mental life is not merely a stream of thought, not just a bundle 
of sensations, not a mere series additively grouped; but a wonder- 
ful unity, taking the form of personality. Here again comes 
something new, something of infinite dignity and worth — 
namely, the self, the man, the ego, the personality, the soul, if I 
may be permitted to use this tabooed word, a word the richness 
of whose connotation will perhaps bring it back when psychology 
has progressed beyond its awkward stage. 

The following quotation from John Laird brings this great 
fact of the unity of the mind into clear relief: 

It is a truism that no study is more perplexing and, at the same time, 
more interesting to a man than the study of mankind and, in the end, of 
himself. Even if the pressure of the day’s business leaves the average 
man but little time for self-reflection, he is still intensely interested in 
the personality of others, and the most obstinate questionings which 
beset him concern his soul and theirs. Moreover, the great objects of 
human interest affect personality and are tinged with personality. It 
is unnecessary to prove this statement by referring to the drama, the 
novel, history, biography. The thing is too obvious to require com- 
ment, and it is enough to illustrate it by mentioning a curious fact. 


1 Watson, op. cit., p. 326. 


300 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Even those who in general have no great fondness for the study of bio- 
graphy are more keenly interested in the personal history of the great 
writers in literature than in their works, or, at any rate, are interested 
in a degree out of all proportion to the intrinsic interest of the careers 
of those authors. How else is it possible to explain the mass of litera- 
ture and the years of discussion devoted to the shadowy author of the 
Odyssey, or to the stray hints which are all that is known of the career 
of Shakespeare? Nor is the reason very far to seek. As Samuel Butler 
says, ‘‘ Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music, or pictures, 
or architecture, or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the 
more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character 
appear in spite of him.” ... It may be a rare thing for the artist to be 
more interesting than the whole body of his work, but his character and 
career usually excite more attention than those of any one of his crea- 
tions, and thus it is that the self is central among the things which 
touch the spirit of man. 


In speaking here of personality, we are using the word in its 
objective sense — just as we use it in daily life when speaking of 
other people. In using also the word self, or ego, or even the word 
soul, we are not implying the existence of any mysterious core of 
reality such as was formerly meant by soul or spirit. We are 
speaking of personality as we meet it in our everyday experience. 
Call it, if you please, after the language of the Behaviorists, the 
totality of ‘inherited and acquired reactions and their integra- 
tions,” an individual’s total assets and liabilities on the reaction 
side, or ‘‘the total mass of organized habits, the socialized and 
regulated instincts, the socialized and tempered emotions, and 
the combinations and interrelations among these.” Or call it, 
after the manner of Mr. Laird, the organization of our mental 
processes. Whatever we call it, we all know that there is nothing 
else quite so real or quite so potent as personality. It is person- 
ality that counts in our social life, in our commercial life, in our 
college and university life, in our homes. 

It was this obvious fact of the peculiar dominating power of 
personality and the peculiar unity and uniqueness of the Self, 
which led all through the centuries to the notion that the human 
personality consists of, or is grounded in, a kind of entity or sub- 


1 John Laird, Problems of the Self. (Copyrighted by the Macmillan Company, 
reprinted by permission), pp. 1, 2. 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 301 


stance called the soul; a simple, indivisible, and indestructible 
being. It was a substance in the sense of ‘‘an unchanging being 
which persists throughout the changes of experience.” 

The soul was thought of as having the experiences, as if it 
could think, feel, endeavor, act. This came partly, no doubt, 
from the felt need of picturing the unity and persistency and 
identity of the Self in some concrete manner after the analogy of 
physical things, like an atom or grain of sand. Such a soul could 
be “located” in a particular part of the brain, as was done by 
Descartes; and of course it was Immortal, leaving the body at 
death. No doubt, too, this way of regarding the soul came 
partly from a faulty logic inherited from Aristotle, which made 
too much of a certain relation of substance and attribute, mental 
processes being thought of as attributes which ‘‘inhere”’ in a real 
substance called the soul. Our new evolutionary way of think- 
ing has changed this. Complexity rather than simplicity may 
be the ground of reality. Perhaps personality represents the 
~ acme of complexity and yet the perfection of reality. 

There results what we call the Self or the Hgo, a personality 
possessing unity, continuity, personal identity. The reality of 
the Self is found in the connectedness of its parts, not in the parts 
themselves. A thing, says Windelband, is ‘‘always the con- 
nectedness of its properties, a synthetic unity, in virtue of which 
they are not merely found together, but are necessarily inter- 
woven. ‘Thus we define chemical substances as the molecular 
unity of atoms which do not casually co-exist, but belong to this 
unity. * 


Mind is what it does 

But now perhaps we can take a further step. We may be 
able to find out something more about the mind than that it is 
an organization of mental processes taking the form of person- 
ality. To do this we shall find it more profitable to study not 
what the mind zs, but what it does. The old notion that you 


1 Wilhelm Windelband, Introduction to Philosophy. Trans. by Joseph McCabe, 
Tetris 

It should be kept in mind that personality is a fact —a reality, an existing 
thing, even an entity, if you please. (Compare the discussion of these terms in 


302 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


will penetrate into the heart of something by analyzing it, pick- 
ing it to pieces, dividing it into its elements, is not fruitful in 
studying the mind. If we take the other way and inquire what 
the mind’s powers are, its capacities, then we get forward in a 
remarkable degree. When we adopt this method of studying 
the mind, we instantly discover that it has certain wonderful 
powers differentiating it from any other form of reality. The 
first and most characteristic of these powers is the one already 
noticed, that of adaptive behavior. Wherever we see among 
organisms the ability to exercise selective response, “‘to adapt 
action to requirements on the basis of experience,” ‘‘to make 
adjustments to novel features in a situation, adjustments not 
provided for by familiar ways of response,” wherever organic 
habits are reconstructed to meet conditions which would other- 
wise bring the life activity to a halt, there we have mind. Mind 
is self-assertive, self-maintaining. 

What it is to have a mind is stated by Woodbridge as follows: 


To-day the idea that ‘to have a mind’ means ‘ to act in a certain way’ 
has become a commonplace in psychology. To think has become an 
adventure and a real instrument in adaptation. Knowledge has ceased 
to be regarded as simply the mental counterpart or image of an objective 
order, and knowing has become an active participation in the order of 
events. In other words, to be conscious of objects does not mean to 
possess their psychical equivalents, or imply a possible consciousness 
which might possess the equivalents of all objects whatever, and so 
be the perfect and complete representative of the world. It means 
rather to operate with objects effectively, to seek and avoid, to work 
changes — in short, to organize experience. This newer conception of 
mind has spread beyond psychology and markedly affected anthro- 
pology and sociology.! 


Mind is, therefore, an activity, a power, a capacity, and in 


Spaulding’s The New Rationalism, chap. xutv.) Furthermore, it would appear 
from the keen analysis in Laird’s Problems of the Self, chaps. x11 and x11, that 
the soul is a ‘‘substance”’ after all; not, to be sure, in the old physical sense of an 
unchanging core or substratum of reality, but in the modern sense of an organ- 
ization of psychical experiences. Probably the whole controversy about the 
soul substance came from taking the word substance too seriously. Lotze, for in- 
stance, calls the self (soul) a simple and indivisible substance, but says he uses the 
word innocently to designate its unity. (Metaphysics, English trans., vol. 1, 
pp. 173-74.) 

1¥F. J. E. Woodbridge, article on ‘‘ Pluralism,’”’ in Hastings’s Encyclopedia of . 
Religion and Ethics. 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 303. 


evolution it is a new power and a new capacity, crowning the 
whole evolutionary movement. It seems that the creative syn- 
thesis present in successive stages of the earth’s history, from the 
purely mechanical to the chemical, thence to the organic, thence 
to the psychic, increases in a kind of geometrical progression, the 
creative power of the human mind knowing scarcely any limits. 
In mind nature reaches a higher level, issues in a new reality, in 
the description of which a new set of terms is necessary. Not 
only has mind the power of envisaging the future and then of 
controlling the present to realize the future, but it is also at home 
in the field of values; it creates these values, then overcomes all 
obstacles to realize them; its field is the field of science, philoso- 
phy, art, literature, and criticism. It surveys and criticizes the 
whole world process, including its own self; it not only studies 
itself, but it has power over itself, self-control and self-direction 
lying within its scope. It not only knows and studies the world, 
but dominates and controls it; the most powerful of the lower 
animals cower before it and become obedient. The forces of 
nature are likewise subservient to mind. It changes the direction 
of energy, subverting to its own ends every form of energy, 
molar, molecular, chemic, thermic, and electric, and by means of 
these transforming the face of nature and modifying its own 
environment, conquering soil and sea and air. It institutes great 
commercial and industrial enterprises, revealing a resourceful- 
ness and inventiveness almost uncanny. 

Not only does the mind have the power of dominion; it has the 
finer faculty of appreciation. It discovers something in nature 
which we call beauty and is silent before it; a pure and peculiar 
joy is felt in its presence. Could there be any more signal evi- 
dence of the power of mind to transcend the forces of the phy- 
sical world than the subtle gift of appreciation? Nothing except 
the power to transcend nature in the production of beauty; and 
this mind does in the field of art. In morals, again, it visions 
higher ideals of conduct than any known before and controls 
itself to realize these ideals. Finally, in human society it 
proposes a program of codperation, love, peace, and sympathy 
to take the place of the older rivalry and war. 


304 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


These are some of the things that mind does. We seem to be 
in the presence of a peculiar and distinctive form of activity 
which we may call spiritual, if we do not use the word spiritual — 
in any ghostly or metaphysical sense, but merely to signify that 
kind of activity which includes not only the intelligent, the 
emotional, and the voluntary, but also conveys the notion of the 
power of appreciation and the creation of the things of highest 
value. Hoernlé describes the mind as follows: 

What seems required is a concept of mind, not so much merely as a 
“cross-section” of the universe, but as a focus, or centre, of experiences 
of the universe — a “subject” (in Hegel’s sense of the term), not a sub- 
stance; a new power, one might almost say, evolved in the world, en- 
dowed with the function of bringing past experience to bear on the inter- 
pretation of present data, of planning and guiding action in proportion 
to knowledge, of controlling desire and seeking new truth, of enjoying 
beauty, of loving and hating, of serving and fighting, of codperating 
with its fellows and of persecuting them, of ascending, in short, to all 
the heights and falling to all the depths which men and women know 
to lie within the compass of human nature.! 


We have seen, then, what the mind does, and from our modern 
point of view to know what it does is to know what it zs. It is 
an activity, a power, a capacity, a process, or an organization of 
processes, and it 1s real because we see in our daily experience these 
things done. ‘That the mind is a dynamic and effective factor in 
the world is the key to the new philosophy of mind of the present 
time. We are not to suppose that the mind is something differ- 
ent from the activity, as if some mysterious thing or substance 
called mind or soul or spirit were acting, or as if the world were 
divided into two realms, mind and matter. This dualistic notion 
does not follow from the facts before us and is passing away in 
philosophy. 

But strangely enough at first sight, it is not necessarily re- 
placed by a monistic conception, as if one should say, “Oh, I see. 
There is no separate kind of being called mind; it is only matter 
in a highly organized form in the human brain that does all these 
things.” It is hard for us to escape from these old scholastic 


1R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics (Harcourt, 
Brace and Company), pp. 242, 243. 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 305 


habits of thought, seeking reality in some metaphysical basis or 
substance called matter or spirit. What we call matter, as the 
term is used in physics, is the last thing on earth which could 
have these capacities, if we could speak of matter as having 
capacity. Or, if we wish to substitute atoms or electrons for the 
word matter, the situation is no better. Atoms and electrons, if 
we wish to think of them as substances which can do things 
rather than as symbols for certain forms of activity, cannot think 
or plan or fashion ideals or exhibit adaptive behavior; nor does 
it have any intelligible meaning to say that the atoms when 
organized in the form of a brain can do these things. Things are 
being done, but the atoms are not doing them. 

Neither does an idealistic form of monism help us to a right 
understanding here, although it might be preferable to a monism 
of a materialistic kind. To say that there is an underlying unity 
or entity or substance in the world called mind or spirit, whose 
manifestations we behold in ourselves and the surrounding world 
_ or whose attributes are thought, feeling, memory and will, is like- 
wise to fall back into outworn scholastic habits of thought. In 
the study of the mind, the reality is before us; we are in its presence. 
Our mental life is not the manifestation of some hidden reality; rt 1s 
the reality. There is a unity, but it is not an underlying unity, a 
world-ground, a presupposition of all things; it 1s rather a unity 
achieved, a unity of organization, a unity of real psychical ex- 
periences. 

But now the reader may say, ‘‘I do not quite get my bearings 
yet. That mental processes exist, that they are organized into 
a unity which we call personality, that mind in this sense is crea- 
tive, and that it further has the power of imagination and appre- 
ciation — all this is evident fact. The creative and original 
power of the mind is daily seen in science, in the mechanic arts, 
in literature, and in the fine arts. I have only to recall the 
creative work of Humboldt, Darwin, Shakespeare, Beethoven, 
Edison, Burbank, and countless other great minds. But still, 
I do not yet quite see what this creative mind is. It is not 
the brain; it is not a mysterious spiritual substance called the 
soul.” 


306 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Mind the fruition of the body 

Perhaps it will help us to understand this if we think of the 
mind as a new power or capacity which has arisen as the outcome 
of the structure and organization of simpler elements. Atoms 
are real, body is real; but so also is mind. The world may be 
looked upon as a process of creative evolution, in which higher 
and higher realities are progressively realized. It is a process of 
realization — perhaps, we may say, of progressive achievement. 
Aristotle had the right idea when he thought of the mind as the 
“form,” or the realization, or the fruition, or perfection of the 
body. The body and the brain are stepping-stones to the higher 
reality, the mind. Evolution displays a series of levels; and the 
secret of the successive stages is found in organization. ‘The 
word integration might be used. The important thing to observe 
here is that the organization of vital or neural processes takes us 
into the realm of the psychical. Creative synthesis is at work all 
along the line in evolution, and novelties appear at each new level. 

The theory of levels we have studied in a former chapter, when 
we were examining the nature and origin of life. Just as we saw 
there that atoms are combined into molecules, not additively, 
but organically, giving rise to new properties which could not be 
inferred from the properties of atoms, and molecules again into 
living cells, in which emerge the new and wonderful properties 
of growth and reproduction, so now we find that mind emerges 
from the organization of vital processes. 


Mind as spirit 

Once again nature has risen to a new level, to the level of the 
psychical, to the realm of mind. Psychical processes are not 
neural processes; they are new processes, having their own dis- 
tinctive subject-matter and their own laws. We are now up in 
the realm of the mental, of the psychical — we may even say, of 
the spiritual. By spirit we mean mind appraised from the stand- 
point of value; and since I believe that in the successive levels 
up which nature climbs in evolution, there is a successive in- 
crease in value, it is proper to speak of the higher realm as the 
spiritual. IJ¢ would be permissible for any one who wishes to 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 307 


earry this thought further to speak of still higher levels in evolu- 
tion, namely, the moral and the social. 

Thus it appears that from the standpoint of evolution mind is 
an achievement, a fruition, perhaps a goal. We have learned that 
mental processes are real; that they take a form of unity which 
we call personality; that they appear as new and distinct powers 
and capacities, the power of adaptive behavior, of creative work, 
and of zsthetic appreciation; and, finally, that they represent 
a stage in the progress of evolution distinguished by the achieve- 
ment of mind. 

Of course, the question will be asked whether we really have 
a right to use the word achievement. Would it not be better — at 
any rate safer — to be satisfied with the ground we have gained 
and speak of structure and organization and the new qualities 
and capacities which structure brings? This alone would furnish 
an adequate philosophy of mind; why go farther and speak of 
the mind as an achievement? The word achievement seems to 
‘Imply both a goal and an agency striving toward the goal. Have 
we any assurance of either? 

I suppose in strictness that we cannot be sure that we have a 
right to use the word goal in speaking of the place of mind in the 
great world program. ‘This will depend upon how far we may 
wish to carry our teleological view of nature. But our philos- 
ophy of mind may be reasonably complete without this belief. 
We may be content to speak of mind as something realized in 
the process of evolution. I think few of us would hesitate to 
call it a value, and that it is the result of striving, if not the 
goal of striving, we have found many reasons for believing. 

Let it be remembered, finally, that in this second section of 
the chapter we have been studying the mind in its narrower 
sense, as intelligence, as adaptive behavior, including what we 
commonly call mental processes, such as thinking, perceiving, 
remembering, and judging; and we have learned that this in- 
telligence is creative, and that it takes the form of personality. 

Let it be remembered, further, that the word mind is often 
used in a broader sense (where the word soul would be preferable) 
to include also those conative tendencies, or biological interests, 


308 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


which we studied in the earlier section, as well as that peculiar 
thing which we call consciousness, to be examined in the section 
to follow. 3 


III. Consciousness 


It remains to speak of consciousness — a word having many 
meanings often confusing to the student. Owing to this con- 
fusion many psychologists have dropped the word from the 
vocabulary of their science. In particular the Behaviorists, 
while not denying that consciousness exists, have been very suc- 
cessful in constructing a science of mind without any reference 
to consciousness at all. In the two preceding sections of this 
chapter, we have made little reference to consciousness and yet 
have arrived at a philosophy of mind as a new power developed 
in the world, a sum of remarkable capacities organized into a 
personal unity or self, and actuated by deep underlying impulses 
and interests. 


Consciousness and mind distinguished 

Nevertheless, we must make the attempt to find out what the 
word consciousness means. A behavioristic psychology may, 
indeed, ignore it; but a philosophy of mind dare not do this. In 
the first place, we must not use the word consciousness as syn- 
onymous with mind, although this has often been done. We 
might, of course, say that something called consciousness accom- 
panies all mental states and processes, but even this is very 
questionable. The Freudians have developed a vital and widely 
accepted theory of mind, in which unconscious mental elements 
play an important part. Or take this example: We may witness 
fear and anger in a child; they are fear and anger — not con- 
sciousness. If you say that you are conscious of the child’s 
anger, you mean nothing more than that you perceive it or are 
aware of it. The child himself may be conscious of his own 
anger; but if he is, the two are certainly not the same; and, in- 
deed, he may not be conscious of it. Very likely he is not; he is 
just angry. Many animals exhibit fear and anger when it would 
be gratuitous to think of consciousness entering into the situa- 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 309 


tion at all. Clearly, then, mind and consciousness are not the 
same.! 

Neither can we think any longer of consciousness as being a 
kind of substance or primordial stuff, out of which mind is made, 
or out of which the world is made, nor can we think of it as an 
entity, or quality of being in itself.2 Nor can we any longer 
think of it as a kind of receptacle zn which ideas and other mental 
things are or exist. Nor have we any “right to conclude that 
consciousness constitutes a series of existences parallel to other 
existences.”’ 3 


Consciousness as inner experience 

Ehminating these various misconceptions of consciousness, 
what remains as the real meaning of the word? One very simple 
solution of the problem and one which at first sight, at any rate, 
seems to be satisfactory, is the view set forth in the preceding 
chapter, when discussing historical theories of mind, the view 
held by Warren and by many other psychologists. Adaptive 
behavior when witnessed in others we call mind; when experi- 
enced in ourselves, it is called consciousness. Conscious phenom- 
ena are merely mental phenomena as they appear subjectively 
in Our own experience. There are two ways of observing mental 
phenomena; in others and in ourselves; in the latter case they 
form a group of conscious phenomena. It is simply another way 
of looking at the same facts — this introspective way; but a very 
important and instructive way, giving us a new world of inner 
experience. Strictly, it is not a new world, but the same world 
regarded from a different point of view, namely, that of inner 
experience. Consciousness is thus a kind of privacy — an inti- 
mate, inner, serious aspect of mental life only half revealed to 


1 Witness the rather strong language used by Bertrand Russell in his book, 
The Analysis of Mind, p. 40: ‘‘It is therefore natural to suppose that, whatever 
may be the correct definition of ‘consciousness,’ ‘consciousness’ is not the essence 
of life or mind. In the following lectures, accordingly, this term will disappear 
until we have dealt with words, when it will reémerge as mainly a trivial and 
unimportant outcome of linguistic habits.” 

2See James, ‘‘Does Consciousness Exist?”’ Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Sct. 
Meth., vol. 1, pp. 447-91. 

3See F. J. E. Woodbridge, ‘‘The Nature of Consciousness,”’ Jour. of Phil., 
_Psych., ané Sci. Meth., vol. u, pp. 119-25. 


310 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the observation of others. Consciousness is thus experience as it 
is lived through by the one who is having the experience, the one 
who is thinking, feeling, wondering, longing. 

There seems to be no objection to the recognition of this mean- 
ing of the word consciousness, provided it is not interpreted in a 
metaphysical way as a kind of double-aspect theory, as if reality 
had two sides, 2 mental and a material side. There is no reason 
why a person should not observe his own mental processes, and 
associated with such observation there would be a wealth of 
memories and of organic feelings not accessible to others. 


Consciousness as a relation 

But, after all, I believe that the truth in this theory of con- 
sciousness can be explained better by a slightly different ap- 
proach. The very simplest and most natural meaning of the 
word consciousness 1s just awareness, involving nothing more 
than a peculiar relation between the perceiving individual and 
the object perceived, characterized by attention and interest. 
Suppose you are sitting alone reading ina room. Suddenly you 
become conscious of the presence of another person in the room. 
Evidently all that is meant is that you become aware of him; 
you hear a slight sound, your attention is arrested, you interpret 
the source of the sound asa person. It seems to be just a per- 
ceptual process, which arouses and holds the attention. The 
unique quality of the experience is found neither in the mental 
content, the sound, nor in the interpretation of the sound as a 
person; but rather in the relation between the object perceived 
and the percipient subject. It is not a matter of perceiving or 
of judging; but just of being aware. 

Let us take a still simpler illustration. You are sitting in a 
room where a clock is ticking; you are engaged intently upon 
some interesting task; you are not conscious of the clock. Sud- 
denly, however, you become conscious of the clock ticking, which 
means simply that you become aware of it, your attention is 


1Compare S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 1, Introduction; and 
Wendell T. Bush, ‘‘An Empirical Definition of Consciousness,’ Jour. of Phil., 
Psych., and Sct. Meth., vol. u, p. 561. 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 311 


drawn to it. Evidently this is the very simplest case of con- 
sciousness, involving nothing more than awareness. Again; let 
us say, that a deer browsing in the woods suddenly becomes 
aware (conscious) of a hunter. The deer just hears him, or 
smells him, then attends, then perhaps reacts violently to the 
situation. Here there would seem to be nothing in addition 
to the cognitive and motor aspects of the experience except 
a certain kind of relationship characterized by attention and 
interest. 

We see, thus, that while consciousness in its simplest form is 
just awareness, it gradually takes on the relation of interest and 
meaning. The sleeping violet receives the first warm rays of 
the sun In spring and responds. Shall we say that the violet is 
aware of the warmth of the sun and is conscious of it? Weare 
hardly justified in saying either. The deer is aware of the 
hunter’s approach; shall we say that the deer is conscious of the 
hunter? Evidently aware is the better word here. But the 
reader in the room is conscious of the other person’s presence. 
There is evidently here a relation of meaning in addition to the 
mere awareness. 

Consciousness appears, thus, to be a special kind of relation 
between the percipient subject and the thing perceived. If this 
be the primary sense of the word consciousness, much of the mys- 
tery and confusion about it is removed. It is not a name for 
the whole mind; it is not the same as mind or soul; it is not any 
special kind of stuff. We cannot any longer speak of the priority 
of consciousness, or the stream of consciousness; perhaps not even 
of the field of consciousness. In all of these expressions we are 
talking about something else, namely, the mind, or mental 
acts, or mental processes. And yet consciousness, as I have 
described it, is a distinct feature of that total thing which we call 
the mind or soul, and is different from all the other parts of it 
which we have been studying. When we speak of mind in the 
narrower sense, we are concerned with some kind of doing. There 
is a situation to be dealt with; a problem to be solved; resistant 
material to be controlled; a conflict to be adjusted. To all these 
“doings,” to the whole system of actions, habits of actions, of 


312 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


plans and projects, of memory images and motor tendencies, we 
may give the name intelligence, mentality, or mind in its restricted 
sense; and to the organization of all these actions and habits 
and memories and names, we may apply the term personality 
or self. 

But consciousness is different from all these. It is more like 
an evanescent something throwing light on the momentary situa- 
tion. Perhaps this light is simply the meaning which things get 
by being grouped in certain relations.! 


Self-consciousness 

Sometimes, however, we use the word consciousness in a 
broader sense than that of the relation of meaning and interest 
which subsists between the perceiving organism and the thing 
perceived. Sometimes we distinguish what we call self-con- 
sciousness; but the principles involved are not different in kind. 
Self-consciousness is still a relation — a togetherness; only now 
there comes into the new grouping a wealth of subjective ele- 
ments, memories, names, interests, and conative tendencies. 

Perhaps the difference between consciousness and self-con- 
sciousness may be illustrated in this way. When we take ether, 
or any anesthetic, we say that we lose consciousness. One’s ex- 
periences in regaining consciousness after the anesthetic are 
instructive. There is first a mere awareness, perhaps of certain 
noises, possibly of the nurses speaking, not brought into any 
clearly defined relation with oneself or the situation. Gradually 
the situation dawns; J am here and have been asleep. The 
voices, myself, the environment, are knit together into a con- 
nected story; I have regained my consciousness. Clearly we 

1 Qn the relational theory of consciousness, consult 

James, ‘Does Consciousness Exist?” Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Sci. Meth., 
vol. 1, pp. 477-91. 

McGilvary, ‘‘ Experience as Pure and Consciousness as Meaning,” Jour. of 
Phil., Psych., and Sci. Meth., vol. vu, p. 511-25. 

Woodbridge, ‘‘The Problem of Consciousness,’’ Studies in Phil. and Psych., 
by former students of G. E. Garman. 1906. 

Woodbridge, ‘*The Nature of Consciousness,” Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Sct. 
Meth., vol. 1, pp. 119-25. 


Montague, ‘‘The Relational Theory of Consciousness and Its Realistic Im- 
plications,’’ Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Sci. Meth., vol. 11, pp. 309-16. 


SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 313 


have here two uses of the word conscious. In:a way I was con- 
scious of those first voices; I was aware of them — that is, I 
merely sensed them. In the other meaning of the word, con- 
sciousness is the connecting together of a present experience with 
my past experiences into a kind of coherent story. In the 
latter sense it is more than mere awareness, or any kind of re- 
sponse or behavior or adaptive reaction. It is something new 
in the progress of evolution, something unique and distinctively 
human. And yet to understand this unique character, it is per- 
haps not necessary to call it, as some have done, a ‘‘new dimen- 
sion of reality.”?1 Call it, perhaps, a new and unique form of 
relationship, a grouping of the complex elements of the self and 
the environment. 

Certainly the philosophy of mind will be greatly simplified if 
this view of consciousness may be accepted. If we find difficulty 
in accepting it, perhaps this will be because of our long cher- 
ished habit of identifying consciousness with mind. But I 
- believe that something will be gained if we place the greater 
emphasis upon thought and creative intelligence as constitu- 
ting the very essence of mind, and reserve the word conscious- 
mess for that peculiar and significant relation, or togetherness, 
which sheds a new light and meaning upon our whole psychical 
life.? 


Conclusion | 

Our conclusion is that the mind is a very complex thing, in- 
cluding, first, a group of conative tendencies or biological inter- 
ests; second, a system of adaptive processes which we may call 
behavior (mind in the narrower sense) ; and, third, consciousness. 
It would conduce to clearness if we could use the word soul for 
mind in the broader sense to include the totality of dispositions, 
processes, and relations, and reserve the word mind for the 
narrower group of processes included in adaptive behavior, the 

2 Compare the full discussion in Spaulding’s The New Rationalism, pp. 470-86. 

2 Compare the full theory of consciousness given by Bertrand Russell in his 
Analysis of Mind, already referred to, p. 288 ff. 


Read. also the account of consciousness in Boodin’s A Realistic Universe, 
chaps. vil and VIII. 


314 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


corresponding adjectives, psychical and mental, falling into their 
appropriate places. The following table will show graphically 
this philosophy of mind: 


Impulse 
Desire 
I. The Conative Tendencies + Will 
Wish 
Libido 
The Soul Personr 
(Mind in Thinking ality 
the wider fh tae ee Judging Adaptive The Self 
sense) (uiinetin the Reasoning Behavior Ego 
Ree) Remembering 
narrower s Reptice 
III. Consciousness Simple Awareness 
Self-Consciousness 
Immortality 


The view of the soul as a value realized through the long 
progress of time has a peculiar significance for the old problem 
of the immortality of the soul. It has always been felt that the 
doctrine of immortality ascribes to the soul a peculiar worth and 
dignity. The soul, since it is deathless, is a thing of priceless 
value, having something of divinity and a peculiar sacredness. 
Such a belief could not fail to have ethical implications of great 
importance, sanctifying conduct through the expectation of an 
endless life. 

But all this lofty philosophy rested upon a faith in the survival 
of the soul after death, and this again depended sometimes upon 
certain religious tenets, which in times of religious doubt would 
lose their convincing power. Hence there would be danger that 
the loss of that particular tenet of religious faith — one having, 
perhaps, little relation to the essentials of religion — would issue 
in the loss of moral ideals. While the hope of heavenly rewards 
and the fear of future punishments for wrong-doing may have 
actually less effect upon conduct than is sometimes assumed, 
still the sudden loss of a long-established faith of this kind would 


* SEARCH FOR THE SOUL— RECONSTRUCTIVE 315 


undoubtedly have some effect upon conduct and morality, with 
possibly serious social consequences, at any rate for a time. 

It would seem, therefore, that any philosophy of mind which 
should establish the absolute worth and dignity of the soul with- 
out reference to the doctrine of survival would have a high ethical 
value. Plato, in his beautiful dialogue called the Phedo, at- 
tempted to establish the truth of immortality upon philosophic 
grounds. In many passages in his writings the immortality of 
the soul is hardly to be distinguished from its divinity. The 
extremely exalted position which Plato ascribes to the soul, with 
its vision of the absolute, its kinship with God, its longing for 
immortality, is what glorifies his philosophy of mind, rather than 
his tales about the soul’s preéxistence and its wanderings in a life 
hereafter. 

As I have tried to point out in this chapter and in preceding 
chapters, we are led to the conclusion that the soul of man is an 
achievement, crowning the development of life which extends 

through hundreds of millions of years. We may believe that 
there was a primeval “‘interest”’ in just this final product, a pri- 
mordial ‘‘effort” to attain to this ‘one far-off divine event.’ 
The soul is thus a value — an ‘‘absolute”’ value, striven for and 
eventually gained. Itis Nature’s perfect work. If there are, 
indeed, higher values, such as truth, justice, beauty, love, yet 
the soul in a way is greater than these, since it recognizes them 
as values and strives for them. 

Thus the word immortal, which means that which has a be- 
ginning and no end, is hardly the word to use in speaking of 
the soul; nor the word everlasting, which means that which has 
neither beginning nor end. We seem to need some word sug- 
gesting ideal worth and enduring value. Possibly the word 
eternal might without too great violence be used in this sense — 
so that we could say of the soul that it is eternal. 

This evaluation of the soul is independent of the question of 
survival — a question which would have to be approached by 
other avenues and after a careful study of the relation of the soul 
to the body. A brief study of this difficult: problem will be made 
in the next chapter, from which it will appear that certain ele- 


316 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


ments in that total complex which we call the soul are manifestly 
of an everlasting character, while others seem to be too closely 
bound up with the body to survive its dissolution. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (Longmans, Green 
and Company), chap. x11, ‘‘A Realistic Theory of Mind.” 
Edwin B. Holt, The Freudian Wish (Henry Holt and Company), chaps. 
Toi. 


Further references: 

John Laird, Problems of the Self. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Boyd H. Bode, ‘‘Consciousness and Psychology,” in Creative Intelligence. 
(Henry Holt and Company.) 

C.S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. (Charles 
Scribner’s Sons.) 

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind. (George Allen and Unwin, 
Ltd.) 

DeWitt H. Parker, The Self and Nature. (Harvard University Press.) 

Joseph Alexander Leighton, Man and the Cosmos. (D. Appleton and 
Company), Book tv. 

William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. (Longmans, Green and 
Company), chap. 1, ‘“‘ Does Consciousness Exist?”’ 

Bernard Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual. (The Mac- 
millan Company.) 

Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany) second series, lectures v1, vit. 

Giovanni Gentile, Theory of Mind as Pure Act. Translated by H. 
Wildon Carr. (The Macmillan Company.) 

J. M. E. McTaggart, Human Immortality and Pre-existence. (Long- 
mans, Green and Company.) 


CHAPTER XVIII 
MIND AND BODY 


THE mind-body problem is almost as old as the history of phi- 
losophy, but it did not become critical until the time of Descartes 
in the seventeenth century. Since then it has caused great 
anguish among both philosophers and psychologists and is one 
of the ‘‘seven world-riddles,’’ which have been said to be inca- 
pable of solution. The problem is, indeed, vexatious, but pos- 
sibly may be greatly simplified if the view of the mind which we 
have developed in the last chapter, namely, as a value achieved 
in the process of creative evolution, should turn out to be true. 


Historical 

But first we must review the history of the problem and the 
several classical solutions. We need only recall these solutions 
here, for we have referred to them in earlier chapters when we 
were studying theories of reality and the history of the theories 
of the mind. We recall Descartes’ hard-and-fast distinction be- 
tween thought and extension, or mind and body, and we remem- 
ber the difficulties that Dualism has always had in accounting 
for the interaction of mind and body, or mind and brain. That 
they do interact seems to be a fact of daily or even momentary 
experience. Constantly the mind acts upon the body, initiating 
movements of the limbs, regulating them, inhibiting them, 
stilling the rapid beating of the heart, controlling the expression 
of the eyes, modulating the tones of the voice; even diseases of 
many kinds may be either caused or cured by mental suggestion. 
Equally evident, as it appears, is the action of the body on the 
mind. Coffee stimulates, tobacco soothes, alcohol stupefies, 
drugs narcotize, labor fatigues, indigestible foods cause fantastic 
dreams, secretions of the endocrine glands or the lack of them 


1 fmil du Bois-Reymond, Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens and Die 
Sieben Weltrithsel. 


318 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


may result in strange psychoses; while even the simplest sensa- 
tion is caused by the stimulation of some sensory nerve. But 
how does all this happen? 

The desperate character of the problem of the connection of 
body and mind can be understood when we recall that a school 
of philosophers called the Occasionalists, following Descartes in 
the seventeenth century, actually held that mind and body do 
not interact, but that the action of either one is the ‘‘occasion” 
of divine interference to effect the corresponding change in the 
other. I will to raise my arm; God raises it. Hardly less ex- 
travagant was Leibniz’ solution of the problem, namely, that of 
preéstablished harmony. That Monad which we call the mind 
does not act upon those Monads which compose the body, but 
the apparent harmony between them is a harmony preéstab- 
lished from the beginning by the perfection of the divine creation. 

Interactionism, nevertheless, is a possible solution of the 
mind-body relation, having advocates at the present time fully 
able to defend it. This theory boldly affirms the duality of 
mind and body in the human personality and declares that they 
act one upon the other. The difficulty so often urged against 
this view arising from the law of conservation of energy is per- 
haps not so serious as it seems;! nor is the other objection, that 
it is “inconceivable” that two wholly unlike things, such as 
mind and body, could interact. The trouble arises, not in the 
possibility of interaction, but in the probability of there being 
two things to interact. It is possible to think in a wholly differ- 
ent way about mind than as a substance in the body or as a series 
of processes ‘‘ parallel’? with bodily processes. To-day we think 
rather of an organism that acts, and of mind as the organization 
of certain distinctive kinds of activities peculiar to man and 
the higher animals. Certain types of “action-systems”’ we call 
mental. Hence at present we do not need to labor over the 
problem of interaction; what we have to do is to ask whether 
there is any necessity for interaction of any kind. 

Next, we recall the various Double-aspect Theories, originated 
by Spinoza and held in one form or another by many modern 

1See above, pp. 214-15. 


MIND AND BODY 319 


psychologists. These attempt to get rid of the mind-body prob- 
lem by denying that there are two realities at all, affirming that 
mind and body are merely two aspects or phases of the same 
reality. 

Sometimes this is called the Identity Hypothesis, since it 
denies the metaphysical duality of mind and body and affirms 
their identity. Closely associated with this view is that of 
Psycho-physical Parallelism. The latter, however, as commonly 
held in psychology, is not strictly a theory of the relation of mind 
and body, but the mere assertion of the apparent fact of their 
invariable association. It is said that there is no psychosis with- 
out neurosis; that there are certain brain processes accompanying 
all psychical processes; that the latter are just as real as the 
former and the former just as real as the latter; but no causal 
connection between the two is assumed, the relation being one of 
mere concomitance in time.’ 

Now, of course, such a mere parallelism could be only a work- 
ing basis for a psychologist who sees in mental processes a series 
of facts and in brain processes another series of facts, and who, 
being unable to understand the relation between them, is content 
merely to describe and study each series by itself and to note the 
association in time between them. But itis evident that, if there 
be such a parallelism, no one could doubt that there must be some 
explanation of this relation; so that any psychologist in his phil- 
osophical moods must refer the observed parallelism back either 
to interaction, or to preéstablished harmony, or to the identity 
hypothesis, or to some materialistic or idealistic theory. Psy- 
cho-physical parallelism, therefore, although we may refer to it 
for convenience under the double-aspect view, is really no theory 
of the mind-body problem at all; it merely sidesteps the diffi- 
culty. Spinoza’s double-aspect theory itself, when examined, 
turns out to be a solution in words only, not in fact; for the dual- 
ity remains just the same after calling mind and body two “‘attri- 
butes”’ of one substance, since Spinoza defines attribute as that 
which intellect sees in substance as constituting its essence. 


1See the clear statement in Héffding’s Outlines of Psychology, pp. 64 ff. 
2See McDougall’s Body and Mind, p. 131. 


320 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


So there seems to be an ‘‘essential”’ difference between the two 
after all. Descartes attempted to mediate between mind and 
body by introducing the mythical ‘‘animal spirits’”’; so Spinoza: 
attempted to mediate by means of a mythical substance. The 
double-aspect view thus seems to be only a verbal solution of 
the problem. 

Next, we recall a third possible solution of the mind-body 
problem, namely, that of the materialistic schools, sometimes 
called Epiphenomenalism. This attempts to get rid of the whole 
mind-body problem by changing the dualism into a monism and 
affirming that the body is the only reality in the case; what we 
call mind being an epiphenomenon, a kind of functionless attend- 
ant upon certain forms of cerebral activity — a sort of shadow 
thrown by the body. Some of the difficulties in this theory have 
been pointed out in a preceding chapter.!. Its weakness does not 
lie so much in its denial of psycho-physical dualism as in its denial 
of the efficacy of mind and in its claim that realty is found in 
certain elementary things, such as material atoms and their mo- 
tions, and in its insistence upon the prerogative character of the 
two sciences, physics and chemistry. 

Finally, we recall a fourth standard solution of the mind-body 
problem, which goes by the general name of Idealism, or, specifi- 
cally, in this case, Psychical Monism. Like materialistic Mon- 
ism it gets rid of the dualism of mind and body by denying the 
reality of one of the factors, but here it is the body whose reality 
is brought into question. Mind, or consciousness, is evidently 
something very real — indeed, the only reality in the world. The 
body is the mind’s manifestation to other observers, a kind of 
externalization or phenomenon of mind. In this case the mind 
is the reality, and the body, the shadow. 

The strength of this important theory rests upon the felt 
priority of the mind over the body. But we should have to dis- 
tinguish between an epistemological priority, a priority of value, 
and amere priority in time. It wou!d seem to be only the second 
which would admit of logical defense. Hence the theory of Psy- 
chical Monism often takes the form of Panpsychism. Go back 


1 See above, chap. x11 and p. 270. 


MIND AND BODY 321 


in time as far as you please to the simplest organism or to the 
molecule or atom. The “essence,” the real stuff of things, is 
mind-stuff; what we call its physical aspect, its outer form, is just 
phenomenon or appearance. 

However, it seems to me that Idealism gets its strongest sup- 
port, not in the denial of the independent reality of the phy- 
sical world, nor in the claim that the latter is mere appearance, 
but in its insistence on the significance and reality and tran- 
scendental value of the mental life when it appears. In other 
words, this idealistic solution of the mind-body problem is pur- 
chased at too great a price. The physical organism may be a 
stepping-stone to the “‘higher”’ reality of mind, or it may be a 
sort of “obstruction” to the upward striving of spiritual powers, 
but at all events it is something wholly real. 

If, then, each of the four of the classical “solutions” of 
the mind-body problem presents almost insuperable difficulties, 
shall we just make our “‘ignoramus”’ or even our “ignorabimus” 

confession and resign the search, taking refuge in a kind of agnos- 
ticism? Such resignation would not harmonize with the spirit 
of philosophy; we must continue the search. 


The Emergent Theory 

Lately a new view of the mind-body relation has been pro- 
posed, called the Emergent Theory, which is at least an interest- 
ing venture. It is closely associated with Aristotle’s doctrine 
that mind is the realization or fruition of the body. If we may 
accept this view, it is with a decided feeling of relief or even of 
emancipation that we discover that the new conception of mind 
sets us free from all the old so-called ‘‘solutions”’ of the mind- 
body problem, from Interactionism, from Parallelism, from Epi- 
phenomenalism, from the Double-aspect Theory, from Subjec- 
tivism, and from Materialism; all these “‘isms’”’ would be su- 
perseded. So also would be the Expression Theory and the 
Transmission Theory.? 


1 James thought it might be possible that the whole world may be a ‘‘mere 
surface-veil of phenomena hiding and keeping back the world of genuine reali- 
ties,’ and that this opaque veil might at certain times and places become thin 
and transparent, letting through gleams from the world of higher reality. Then 


sé 


322 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Mind and body do not interact, as Interactionism and Dualism 
teach. The mind is not a form of the mechanical interplay of 
atoms, as Materialism teaches. The body is not a phenomenon 
or appearance or externalization of mind, as Idealism teaches. 
Mind and body are not parallel, as Psycho-physical Parallel- 
ism teaches. Neither are they two sides or aspects of the same 
reality, as the Double-aspect Theory teaches. You cannot re- 
present the relation of mind and body by any system of par- 
allel lines, whether merely parallel, interconnected, or correlated 
with a third line, nor by two lines one of which is the shadow of 
the other. Mind is something which the body achieves, or which 
nature achieves by means of the body. If you must have a dia- 
gram, the ladder will be better than the parallel bars. When 
nature achieves the molecule, the atom ceases to be the thing of 
primary importance, worth, or reality. When nature achieves 
the cell, the molecule is eclipsed. When the organism is achieved, 
the cell is eclipsed. When mind is achieved, the body is eclipsed. 
Mind is a new reality, gained, achieved, won; it is, in Aristotelian 
phrase, the form of the body. 

Evidently, if we want a name for this new notion of the rela- 
tion of mind to body, we may call it the Emergent Theory.! Mind 
emerges from the body. The theory of levels would take the 
place of Parallelism, Interactionism, and the Double-aspect 
let it be assumed that the human brain is such a thin and half-transparent place 
in the veil. In that case the life of souls might reveal itself through the human 
‘ brain, which thus transmits messages, so to speak, from the world of spirit. 
Something like this was James’s transmission theory, which I think he put for- 
ward only as a possibility worthy of further consideration. See his Human 
Immortality, p. 15 ff. 

Bergson’s theory is somewhat similar. He regards mind or consciousness as 
a real independent form of being, the consciousness of each individual forming 
a part of a vast cosmic sea of consciousness, focussed, as it were, in individual 
organisms and having its individuality determined by the form of the physical 
organization. ‘The brain is thus a mechanism transmitting something of this 
cosmic conscious stream and making it effective in the world of matter. 

For the Expression Theory of the relation of mind and body, see DeWitt 
H. Parker, The Self and Nature, chap. tv, ‘‘The Relation between Mind and 
Body.” 

18. Alexander, who has made the Emergent Theory familiar to us, says that 
Lloyd Morgan and George Henry Lewes had previously used the term. Com- 
pare his Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 1, p. 14. Morgan, in his recent book, Emer- 


gent Evolution, has applied the principle of emergence to the whole evolutionary 
movement. 


MIND AND BODY 323 


view. It is hard to say which of these theories is the most un- 
satisfactory, and the escape from them would be wholesome. All 
the dualistic theories are unconvincing. There is no magic 
about the number two. Nature having achieved two, goes on 
to three and four. The monistic theories are little better, al- 
though, if mind be the supreme reality, there is a sense of the 
word reality which admits of a monistic interpretation, a monism 
of value, perhaps. Pluralistic world views seem here to be more 
promising; mind is real, body is real, and so are many other 
things. 

But, some reader will say, the mind-body problem cannot be 
disposed of so easily —in this high-handed manner. Mental 
processes seem to be correlated with bodily processes. With 
every mental image, every sensation or perception, some neural 
process is correlated. In answer to this it may be said that, 
according to the Emergent Theory, there zs no correlation, 
there is no parallelism, there is no double-aspect. It is rather 
a case of different levels of reality. What we really have is a 
series of vital processes, which, when integrated or organized, 
exhibit capacities that we call mental or psychical. When they 
reach the point of attaining to that kind of activity which we 
call intelligent control, we no longer speak of them as vital or 
neural processes, but as psychical; we are up on a new level, 
among new realities, in a new atmosphere, dealing with new 
things, having their own laws and peculiarities. Mind has 
emerged from matter; the spiritual has emerged from the physi- 
cal. After long centuries of misuse, the word spirit gains a defi- 
nite and profitable meaning; it means the level of the psychical 
as viewed from the standpoint of value. 

This solution of the mind-body problem seems too simple and 
easy to be true. There must be some hitch in it somewhere, else 
it would have been adopted long ago. It was, to be sure, ac- 
cepted by Aristotle, but why was it ever given up? Perhaps it 
was the influence of Descartes and his atomic theory of the soul 
as a substance inhabiting the body that has led us away from the 
Aristotelian doctrine of the soul as the form, or entelechy, or 
realization of the body. 


324 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Limitations of the Emergent Theory 

In truth, however, the Emergent Theory does encounter some 
difficulties, and should not be accepted without careful inquiry.. 
The first thing that we must notice is that the mind, as we have 
learned in the last chapter, is very complex, and includes more 
than that sum or organization of mental capacities which goes to 
make up either adaptive behavior or creative intelligence. If we 
use the word mind in its narrower and simpler meaning as crea- 
tive intelligence, I see no reason for refusing to adopt the Emer- 
gent Theory; it emancipates us from much mystery and con- 
fusion. But what about that elusive thing we call consciousness, 
and what about those primordial things which we call conation, 
will, impulse, instinct, the springs of conduct and behavior? 

I think all this goes to show that the old mind-body problem 
was a kind of pseudo-problem. It considered the mind as a 
simple spiritual essence or thing which had to be got into some 
kind of definite relation to the body. Consciousness, for in- 
stance, is not an entity standing over against the body which 
must find its relation to the body; it is itself a relation between 
the perceiving organism and the thing perceived, or in its higher 
form it is a complex relationship which makes a connected story 
of all the elements of our mental life. 

If, then, consciousness is to be kept distinct from thought, in- 
telligence, and creative activity, and is to be defined in its sim- 
plest sense as awareness, and in its fuller sense as that peculiar 
kind of relationship or togetherness among the various elements 
of our experience which goes to make them a connected story, 
then we see that it becomes rather meaningless to ask about the 
connection between consciousness and the body. When we do 
so, we are still thinking of consciousness in the old way as some 
unitary or substantial thing which could interact with the body 
or be parallel with it or be another aspect of it. This becomes 
very clear when we take consciousness in its simplest form as 
awareness. Suppose we should say that the wild flower is in 
a rudimentary way ‘‘aware”’ of the sunshine toward which it 
bends? Would it not then be a rather meaningless question to 
ask about the relation of the awareness to the “body” of the 


MIND AND BODY 325 


flower? The awareness is itself a relation of the flower to some- 
thing else. Even the Emergent Theory would not apply here, 
although we might say that consciousness, certainly in the higher 
sense of self-consciousness, is something which arises in the 
course of evolution. 

And then there is that third class of elements belonging to the 
total thing which we call the mind, namely, the conative tenden- 
cies, or impulsive strivings, or biological interests — how are 
these connected with the body? Here again we see how compli- 
cated, if not misleading, the mind-body problem is; and here 
again we see that it is better to look at it from the evolutionary 
point of view rather than from that of parallelism or interaction, 
or the double-aspect. The relationship here is evidently not 
the same as in the case of consciousness, nor is it the same as in 
the case of thought, behavior, and intelligence; for the conative 
tendencies are the profound springs of our mental life. Perhaps 
mind in the sense of intelligence is the znstrument of these deep 
conative energies. The Pragmatists tell us that thought and 
intelligence are instrumental; they are instruments for environ- 
mental control; they enable an organism to deal with a new and 
perplexing situation. But who or what is it that is using intelli- 
gence as an instrument for control? Evidently it is the biologi- 
cal interests that are served in this way. It would be possible 
therefore to think of the brain, and indeed also the muscles and 
bones and many other parts of the body, as well as the peculiar 
mental powers which emerge from all this organization, as the 
instruments of the biological interests. In that case a new form 
of the instrumental theory would appear as the solution of that 
part of the mind-body problem relating to the conative tenden- 
cies or the biological interests. 

To be sure, those who prefer a naturalistic or materialistic in- 
terpretation of everything would, no doubt, prefer to say that 
the vital strivings, the conative tendencies, emerge as a result of 
organization of simple physical and chemical elements. But 
our present state of knowledge does not permit us to hold 
that the conative tendencies emerge from the organization of 
material units. The reverse seems to be more probable, as we 


326 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


have seen in the fuller discussion in the preceding chapter. If 
there is anything that we must think of as original and primitive 
and primordial in the world, it would seem to be something 
which we may call effort or impulse, rather than matter or body. 
Bergson believes that inert matter represents the inversion or 
interruption of life, reality having its form in the original im- 
petus, ‘‘the internal push that has carried life, by more and more 
complex forms, to higher and higher destinies.”’ } 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Friedrich Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy (Henry Holt and Company), 
pp. 128-44. 


C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), 
lecture m1, ‘‘ Mental and Non-Mental.”’ 


Further references: 
William McDougall, Body and Mind. (The Macmillan Company.) 


R. W. Sellars, Evolutionary Naturalism (The Open Court Publishing 
Company), chap. xIv. The Essentials of Philosophy (The Mac- 
millan Company), chap. xxII. 


H. Bergson, Matter and Memory. (The Macmillan Company.) 


S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (The Macmillan Company), vol. 11, 
book m1, chap. I. 


C. A. Strong, Why the Mind Has a Body. (The Macmillan Company.) 
Descartes, Meditations. Especially 1 to Iv. 
Spinoza, Ethics, book 1. 


1 Creative Evolution, p. 102. 


CHAPTER XIX 
FREEDOM 


The new interest in freedom 

A NEw interest has been added to the ancient controversy 
about the Freedom of the Will owing to the striking stand taken 
by Bergson and James. I shall reserve further mention of this 
new philosophy of contingency till later in the chapter, mean- 
while trying to remove some of the obscurity which has unnec- 
essarily attached to the problem. Is it a problem or a puzzle? 
Some one has said that the difference between a puzzle and a 
problem is that the latter yields to reflective thought. Will 
reflective thought unravel the difficulties of this old problem? 
As a student I recall sitting up half a night wrangling over it 
with my roommate. Possibly a careful definition of terms 
would have removed part of the trouble. 


What is it to be free? 

In its simplest meaning freedom refers to the absence of com- 
pulsion or restraint or constraint by any external power. The 
slave is not free because other men constrain him. A caged lion 

is not free because the bars restrain him. The lion released from 
his cage and back in his jungle is free to live out the life of his 
kind, and this is what freedom means for him. The emancipated 
slave, with the privilege of mingling on equal terms with other 
men, of working for himself, of cultivating his own land, and dis- 
posing of the products of his labor as he sees fit, is free. 

Of freedom in this sense the man and the woman of the twen- 
tieth century have a large measure. Unenslaved, unfettered, 
and unrestrained, they are free to work out their desired ends. 
Our government is founded on the principle of individual free- 
dom. Successively we have sought and gained emancipation of 
the individual from autocratic government, emancipation of the 
negro from slavery, emancipation of women from inequalities of 


328 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


sex, emancipation of men and women from foolish restrictive 
traditions and conventions, and are now demanding and getting 
emancipation of labor from capitalistic oppression. One won- 
ders sometimes whether our mania for freedom may not blind us 
to the necessity for wholesome discipline. At any rate, we seem 
to have in these modern days all the freedom that we can safely 
use — perhaps more. 


Determinism 

But, you reply, in the free-will discussion this is not what we 
mean by freedom. The question is whether a person’s actions 
are free in the sense that they are not necessitated, determined, 
made certain and predictable by antecedent factors in the total 
situation. Are not human actions, like everything else in nature, 
under the reign of natural law, which rigidly determines what- 
ever happens in the world, including human behavior? Are we 
not all caught in the clutches of the law of cause and effect, so 
that every act of ours is caused by some preceding event or con- 
dition? Can the human will escape the chains of mechanism 
which prevail throughout nature? 

This is the familiar argument of the determinist. Human 
acts like all other events in nature obey nature’s laws. They 
are strictly deducible from other antecedent events. All tran- 
sitions are necessary transitions. It would be impossible to 
conceive of an event, even a human act of choice, as being un- 
caused. Human volitions are strictly determined by preceding 
volitions, by acquired habits, traditions, customs, and education. 
An all-seeing eye could predict with absolute certainty the 
motives, actions, and behavior of an animal or man. A man’s 
character is determined by his heredity, his social environment, 
his circumstances, and his education. The feeling of freedom is 
an illusion, arising from the fact that we are unconscious of the 
causes which determine our conduct. Statistics also show that 
human acts are quite uniform and to an outside observer have 
all the earmarks of determined quantities. Marriage, divorce, 
and suicides vary rather uniformly with economic, social, and 
moral conditions. 


FREEDOM 329 


This line of reasoning seems very impressive. In the closing 
years of the nineteenth century it found general acceptance — 
especially among those who had grown accustomed to hold the 
physical sciences in a certain veneration. The advent of Dar- 
winism greatly strengthened the position of the determinist. 
Man is not above nature, but a mere product of it. His humble 
origin has been discovered. He is only a highly developed form 
of the simplest animal life. There is no break in nature — no 
place where its laws cease to operate. The leaves of the tree un- 
fold in accordance with these laws. In the same way the child 
eats, sleeps, grows, thinks, and chooses, all in conformity with 
natural law. Thus, the theory known as Determinism came to 
be widely accepted, not only among physical scientists, but 
among moralists, sociologists, and even theologians. It was said 
that there is nothing in determinism in any way repulsive either 
to morals or religion. It is consistent with good conduct, good 
citizenship, and human responsibility. Evil would still be evil 
and good would still be good, and we should be responsible for 
our conduct just the same. It would be useless for the offender 
to go before the judge and say: “‘Do not punish me. I am not 
responsible for my actions; they are fatally determined for me by 
the laws of nature. My acts of will are determined by my mo- 
tives.” The judge would reply: ‘‘ Very well, we will give you 
some new motives for good behavior. Thirty days. Next case.” 

Jurisprudence and good government find nothing objection- 
able in determinism. Every man with average intelligence, who 
can understand the difference between right and wrong, who is 
capable of deliberation, and can weigh the worth to himself or 
to society of different courses of action, is held responsible for 
his deeds, and frankly recognizes his own responsibility. If his 
actions are determined by his former choices, by his appetites 
and passions, by his habits and traditions, these are all parts of 
himself, and so thus far his determination is self-determination; 
that is, it isfreedom. Thus it has come about that determinism 
has been and still is accepted by many of the most careful, schol- 
arly, and conservative writers both in morals and in philosophy. 
A certain truth in the position of the determinist, indeed, con- 


330 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


tains the only assurance that education will be effective and 
character dependable. 

For this is what we mean by dependability. We mean that a 
man’s education, his family and social traditions, his respect for 
the laws of the state, and for the rules of honesty and integrity 
will be powerful factors in the control of his conduct. We mean 
that we can count on the man. We know what he will do. We 
can trust him. Otherwise, character would count for nothing. 
If free-will meant the absence of this kind of control, no one 
would wish to have it; certainly no one would wish his child or 
his friend to have it. In time of need your friend might or might 
not come to your aid. Your trusted clerk might or might not 
turn over the proceeds of a sale. Your mother might or might 
not minister to you in sickness. Commercial insurance of bank 
clerks would be at an end. Chaos would rule in society and 
caprice in personal conduct. 

Thus the theory of determinism seems to hold its ground 
against all comers. There appears to be no escape from its rigid 
conclusions. Of course, the free-willist, striving to retain his be- 
lief in freedom, will reply: “It is true that a person is influenced 
in his choices by his education, his traditions, and by social cus- 
toms; but he is not determined by them. He weighs and delib- 
erates, of course; but when he chooses, his choice is free. He ig 
conscious of his own freedom. At the very least he can freely 
turn his attention to a given course of action, and attention, as is 
known, is the precursor of actual volition — and attention is 
free.’’ But the determinist replies that attention, like any other 
mental process, flows inevitably from its antecedent mental 
processes, being linked thereto with the fatal linkage of causality. 


Weaknesses in the logical basis of determinism 

Nevertheless, the case for determinism is not so clear as might 
appear from the usual popular statements of it. The argument 
as set forth above is full of loose generalizations, which the care- 
ful student of science would hesitate to endorse. One should not 
take too seriously such expressions as the rezgn of law and causal 
necessity. The laws of nature do not “‘reign” and they do not 


———— a 


FREEDOM 331 


“determine” anything. They are not compelling forces, nor 
forces of any kind. They are simply formule summarizing a cer- 
tain amount of experience concerning uniformities in nature. 
Science knows nothing of necessity, or absolute certainty, in the 
behavior of phenomena — only uniformity. When certain se- 
quences are uniformly observed in nature, there is a reasonable 
expectation that the given antecedents, when they occur again, 
will be followed by the given consequents, but there is no neces- 
sity in the case. ‘There seems to be sufficient uniformity in 
nature to enable us to predict the future with a high degree of 
certainty at the level of the mechanical sciences, with varying 
degrees of certainty in the organic sciences, and with some degree 
of certainty in human affairs. 

A more careful analysis of the notion of cause — such, for 
instance, as that made by Bertrand Russell — shows that we 
must get rid of any element of compulsion in it, and that the uni- 

formity found in nature is in nowise inconsistent with freedom. 
- Freedom, in short, in any valuable sense, demands only that our voli- 
tions shall be, as they are, the result of our own desires, not of an outside 
force compelling us to will what we would rather not will. Everything 
else is confusion of thought, due to the feeling that knowledge compels 
the happening of what it knows when this is future, though it is at once 
obvious that knowledge has no such power in regard to the past. Free 


will, therefore, is true in the only form which is important; and the 
desire for other forms is a mere effect of insufficient analysis.t 


Another method of approach 

But now there is another way of approach to the whole subject 
of freedom, somewhat more biological and evolutionary. We 
have to ask the question whether there may not be in nature and 
in mind something which we may call real spontaneity. If so, 
it would not, of course, follow that every human volition is 
free; it would only follow that the possibility of real freedom 
exists. Evidences are accumulating which point to the pres- 
ence of spontaneity rather than uniformity at certain stages 
of the evolutionary process. Nature seems to escape more and 


1 Bertrand Russell, Scientific Method in Philosophy (Open Court Publishing 
Company), p. 2386. 


332 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


more from the mechanistic treadmill and to blossom out into 
marvelous novelties, such as life and mind and morality and 
conscious codperation. Organic life is characterized by a kind 
of behavior which the word spontaneity defines more accurately 
than the phrase mechanical necessity. At the organic level, fac- 
tors enter upon. the scene which we speak of as interests. ‘The 
appetency, urgency, insurgency of life, its character of craving, 
desire, and striving, are no longer adequately described in the 
vocabulary of the physical sciences, where something like the 
mere impact of physical particles makes us think in terms of com- 
pulsion and necessity. Living organisms do not seem to be 
driven along, like the wings of a waterwheel by the blows of the 
water. They seem rather to be seeking something, needing 
something, desiring something. ‘There is the forward, not the 
backward look. In organic nature the “‘conative bow is bent 
ever toward the future.” The phraseology of determinism is 
drawn from the mechanical sciences and is only awkwardly 
adapted to a vital situation. 

A recent writer calls attention to the fact that “at the au- 
tumnal climax of productivity in lakes, there may be to the 
square yard seven thousand millions of a well-known Diatom, 
Melosira varians, so that the water is like a living soup,”’ 


But in addition to the abundance of life — alike of individualities and 
of individuals — there is the quality of insurgence. Living creatures 
press up against all barriers; they fill every possible niche all the world 
over; they show that Nature abhorsa vacuum. We find animals among 
the snow on Monte Rosa at a height of over ten thousand feet; we 
dredge them from the floor of the sea, from those great “‘deeps”’ of over 
six miles where Mount Everest would be much more than engulfed. It 
is hard to say what difficulties living creatures may not conquer or cir- 
cumvent. ... When we consider the filling of every niche, the finding 
of homes in extraordinary places, the mastery of difficult conditions, the 
plasticity that adjusts to out-of-the-way exigencies, the circumvention of 
space (as In migration), and the conquest of time (as in hibernation), we 
begin to get an impression of the insurgence of life. We see life persist- 
ent and intrusive — spreading everywhere, insinuating itself, adapting 
itself, resisting everything, defying everything, surviving everything! 


1 Quoted by permission from The Outline of Science (vol. 111, p. 708), edited by 
J. Arthur Thomson. (l’our volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922.) 


FREEDOM 333 


In fact, throughout the whole evolutionary movement nature 
seems to be struggling to free itself from the mechanistic chains, 
trying like a growing child to acquire a will of its own. Evolu- 
tion, as we have seen in a former chapter, has been described as 
a long struggle for freedom. When living organisms reach the 
stage represented by the human mind, vital interests become 
conscious. Behavior is deliberately adapted to the realization of 
definite ends. The human mind escapes from the control of cir- 
cumstances — indeed, circumstances themselves are controlled 
in order to realize purposes. The value of different possible 
courses of conduct is appraised, and means are consciously chosen 
to gain the higher values. To a situation like this the old phrase- 
ology of determinism is still less adapted than to the situation 
represented by organic life in its lower stages. The language of 
freedom, while not wholly applicable, seems here more appro- 
priate. 

Indeed, it is just this spontaneity of nature which accounts for 

evolution itself. In organic evolution nature seems to get a new 
“thought” every little while, and syntheses take place from 
which new wonders emerge. Relations arise which do not seem 
to be well expressed by the phrase cause and effect; it seems more 
like a case of the emergence of new qualities. The new values do 
not seem to be “determined”’; they seem to be ‘‘realized.”’ The 
movements of a machine are determined. Supply oil and fuel, 
and mill-like the machine goes on until worn out. The language 
of determinism fits it perfectly; but such language is ill-adapted 
to describe the behavior of organisms, and is wholly inadequate 
to describe the conduct of intelligent beings. Here means and 
end take the place of cause and effect. In adaptive behavior the 
individual is engaged in controlling a hostile environment in 
order to meet a situation and attain a desired end. Incompat- 
ible factors in some perplexing situation issue In experimentation 
and successful adaptation. Future consequences are dynamic 
factors in the course of action. If we must choose between the 
words free and determined to describe such action, the word free 
is surely to be preferred. 

It seems thus that the old dispute about freedom and deter- 


334 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


minism has become antiquated in this newer way of regarding 
the behavior of living organisms. Determinism is not disproved; 
it is simply transcended. Its language does not fit the situation. 
Neither are such words as zndeterminism or libertarianism par- 
ticularly happy. The word freedom is better, but it has been 
brought over from another realm of thought and is not just the 
word we want. Let the traditional Martian visitor come to 
earth and say to man: “Are you free?” ‘‘No!” would be the 
answer, “‘we are hampered.” “Are all your movements con- 
trolled and determined?” ‘‘Nonsense, No! We are striving 
for certain ends and we are gaining them with difficulty, but on 
the whole we are successful.” 

Thus, in the end it comes about that as a simple description of 
the actual situation in respect to human conduct, while the lan- 
guage of freedom is inadequate, that of determinism is obsolete. 
We seem to need a new set of terms all around. It is probable 
that there would never have been any controversy over the free- 
dom of the will had not confusion arisen about the question of 
moral responsibility. When theologians taught the doctrine of 
retributive rather than natural punishments (realizing as they 
did the heinousness of sin and its fearful consequences), they be- 
gan to raise the question whether a person could be justly pun- 
ished when his conduct is so intimately connected with circum- 
stances of heredity, education, and environment. The answer 
to this should have been that punishments are not retributive, 
but natural or disciplinary. In this way, having discovered that 
people are in any case responsible for their conduct, the psycho- 
logical problem of freedom could have been wholly disassociated 
from the moral problem; and then it would have been seen that 
terms such as freedom and determinism are not particularly happy 
ones in describing human conduct. What we have is a striving 
organism, subject to influences on every side, accepting or re- 
sisting them, threading its way through them, battling against 
them, pressing ever on. 


The new philosophy of contingency 
It was something of a shock to the complacent thought of the 


FREEDOM 835 


closing century, comfortably resigning itself to a philosophy of 
determinism, when James and Bergson came out bluntly in 
favor of freedom.! James startled his generation by his vigorous 
defense of freedom at a time when freedom seemed to conflict 
with every scientific canon. Why, he asks, should we stumble 
over a certain law of causality, if it contradicts an immediate fact 
of experience, such as our consciousness of freedom and the fact 
of regret for wrong-doing. The law of causality is ‘‘an altar to an 
unknown God.”’ The world is not so closely and fatally articu- 
lated as determinism supposes. It is not a necessary presuppo- 
sition ‘that those parts of the Universe already laid down abso- 
lutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be.”’ It is 
not certain that ‘‘the future has no ambiguous possibilities hid- 
den in its womb.”’ It may well be that possibilities are in excess 
of actualities and that the parts of the Universe have a certain 
amount of “loose play.” There is room in the world, so James 
believes, for novelty, contingency, activity, and real freedom. 
There are discontinuities as well as continuities. 

Our sense of “freedom” supposes that some things at least are decided 
here and now, that the passing moment may contain some novelty, be 
an original starting-point of events, and not merely transmit a push 
from elsewhere. We imagine that in some respects at least the future 
may not be co-implicated with the past, but may be really addable to it, 
and indeed addable in one shape or another, so that the next turn in 
events can at any given moment genuinely be ambiguous, i.e., possibly 
this, but also possibly that... . 

To some extent the world seems genuinely additive: it may really be 
so. We cannot explain conceptually how genuine novelties can come; 
but if one did come we could experience that it came. We do, in fact, 
experience perceptual novelties all the while. Our perceptual experi- 
ence overlaps our conceptual reason: the that transcends the why. So 
the common-sense view of life, as something really dramatic, with work 
done, and things decided here and now, is acceptable to pluralism. 
“Free will” means nothing but real novelty; so pluralism accepts the 
notion of free will.? 


The world is not quite so orderly, so continuous, so inert, so 


1A clear account of these new studies may be found in Gertrude Carman 
Bussey’s brief monograph entitled T'ypical Recent Conceptions of Freedom. 

2 William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Longmans, Green and Com- 
pany), pp. 139-41. 


336 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


carefully predetermined, so absolutely single, as we used to think. 
There is room in it even for irrelevances, and for real possibilities, 
real beginnings, real catastrophes, real decisions, and real regrets. 
It is, indeed, the fact of regret — genuine and lasting regret — 
which leads James unequivocally to espouse the cause of in- 
determinism. 


What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right 
way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible 
and a natural way, —— nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? 
And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the 
wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the 
right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness 
to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good 
and bad. I cannot understand the belief that an act is bad, without re- 
gret at its happening. I cannot understand regret without the admis- 
sion of real, genuine possibilities in the world. Only then is it other than 
a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an irreparable 
opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it must forever 
after mourn.! 


Even chance, if we insist on using the word, is preferable 
to destiny. The “frightful” associations connected with the 
word chance have prejudiced people against indeterminism as 
much as the eulogistic associations of the word freedom have 
prejudiced them in favor of it. James thus sounds the note of 
optimism and of possible victory. With his pluralistic and rest- 
less Universe, his real possibilities and real choices, his real good 
and real evil, he offers to many a gospel of hope and courage. To 
others, lovers of order and rationality and unity, his disorderly 
and chaotic Universe brings fear and dismay. As he frankly 
says, it is to some extent a matter of temperament. All that he 
wishes to show is that there is a place in the world for freedom, if 
for ethical or practical or purely empirical reasons one prefers 
this belief. James’s pluralistic philosophy does not, of course, 
prove that human volitions are free, but only that the Universe 
is of such a kind that there is room in it for freedom,? so that if 


1 William James, The Will to Believe (Longmans, Green and Company), pp. 175 
and 176. 

2See good discussion in Perry’s Present Tendencies in Philosophy, chap. x1, 
secs. 5, 6, and 7. 


FREEDOM Soy. 


one believes in freedom he need not be frightened away by the’ 
too plausible arguments of the determinists. 

James himself accepts freedom as a fact on ethical grounds and 
on the grounds of immediate experience. Hitherto we have been 
so zealous to show the logical coherence of the world that we 
have forgotten that it must also have moral coherence. The 
moral struggle must be a genuine one, not a sham; and it could 
not be genuine without the postulate of freedom. It was James’s 
peculiar mission to try to do justice to facts of all kinds from all 
departments of life and experience. 

His knowledge and appreciation of human nature were such as to 
make it impossible for him ever to assent to the view that all human ex- 
perience is describable in terms of the motion of molecules. His moral 
vigor, moreover, led him to demand the recognition of the genuineness 
of human struggle. Again and again he insisted that life loses its dra- 
matic quality and its significance if human activity has no part to play, 
here and now in the destiny of the universe. 


Bergson’s view 

Bergson, like James, accepts unreservedly the freedom of the 
will, but now, in place of James’s fearless and sometimes perhaps 
a little reckless affirmation of contingency in the world at large, 
we have a carefully reasoned philosophy of contingency. Free- 
dom is involved in the very structure of reality from Bergson’s 
point of view. The fundamental reality of the world is a ‘‘ psy- 
chical life unfolding beneath the symbols which conceal it’’; and 
time is the very stuff that this psychic life is made of. Time, 
therefore, in the sense of duration, is something very real to 
Bergson, in fact the reality of all realities; and ‘‘duration means 
invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the 
absolutely new.”’ Freedom, therefore, is the very essence of the 
psychical life. Life itself 7s freedom, spontaneity, change, crea- 
tion. The law of causality, which depends upon uniform se- 
quences, can have no application here where there are no repe- 
titions, where creative activity is ever at work, and where there 
can be no uniform sequences. 


1 Gertrude Carman Bussey, J'ypical Recent Conceptions of Freedom (Morey), 
p. 29 


338 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


When we once come to understand the nature of life and mind, 
the old puzzle about freedom disappears; for we see that the fu- 
ture is not something to be chosen, but something to be created. 
What we have is not a choice of alternatives, but a changing, 
growing Self. The real world to Bergson is not the geomet- 
rized and spatialized world known to the intellect, but the world 
of duration, consciousness, mind-energy, growth, change, and 
primeval impulse seen in intuition. In these profound and orig- 
inal depths of reality there can be no question of compulsion — 
only of impulsion. Here is free creative activity. Matter, indeed, 
is a kind of obstruction to the original creative activity. But it 
does not seek to impose its laws upon this activity; it has no 
such power. ‘‘Consciousness appears as a force seeking to insert 
itself in matter in order to get possession of it and turn it to its 
profit.”’ 

Consciousness and matter appear to us, then, as radically different 
forms of existence, even as antagonistic forms, which have to find a 
modus vivendi. Matter is necessity, consciousness is freedom; but 
though diametrically opposed to one another, life has found the way of 
reconciling them. ‘This is precisely what life is, — freedom inserting 
itself within necessity, turning it to its profit. Life would be an im- 
possibility were the determinism of matter so absolute as to admit no 
relaxation! ... 

I see in the whole evolution of life on our planet a crossing of matter 
by a creative consciousness, and effort to set free, by force of ingenuity 
and invention, something which in the animal still remains imprisoned 
and is only finally released when we reach man.! 


With such a philosophy as this the old problem of freedom and 
determinism presents little difficulty; life and freedom are almost 
synonymous. 


When we put back our being into our will, and our will itself into the 
impulsion it prolongs, we understand, we feel, that reality is a perpetual 
growth, a creation pursued without end. Our will already performs 
this miracle. Every human work in which there is invention, every vol- 
untary act in which there is freedom, every movement of an organism 
that manifests spontaneity, brings something new into the world.? 


1 Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy, Lectures and Essays. Translated by H. Wildon 
Carr (Henry Holt and Company), pp. 17-18, 23. 
2 Creative Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), p. 239. 


FREEDOM 339 


Hence we see again how the old discussions have confused the 
issue. It is not a question of freedom and determinism, but a 
question of freedom and incumbrances. ‘The primeval impetus, 
the élan vital, may meet with defeat, but defeat is not determina- 
tion. No one claims that life may not sometimes be enslaved, 
that even man may not sometimes be enslaved. Too often just 
this has happened. But the free spirit of man still lives and 
slowly overcomes its conquerors, emerges as a victor, and ex- 
presses itself in art, philosophy, and science, and in free political 
institutions. Bergson states it somewhat differently: 


Radical therefore, also, is the difference between animal conscious- 
ness, even the most intelligent, and human consciousness. For con, 
sciousness corresponds exactly to the living being’s power of choice; it is 
co-extensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real 
action: consciousness is Synonymous with invention and with freedom. 
Now, in the animal, invention is never anything but a variation on the 
theme of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no 
doubt, in enlarging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes 
automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create a new auto- 
matism. The gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened; by 
pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it. With man, con- 
sciousness breaks the chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself 
free. ... 

Our brain, our society, and our language are only the external and 
various signs of one and the same internal superiority. They tell, each 
after its manner, the unique, exceptional success which life has won at 
a given moment of its evolution. They express the difference of kind, 
and not only of degree, which separates man from the rest of the animal 
world. They let us guess that, while at the end of the vast spring-board 
from which life has taken its leap, all the others have stepped down, 
finding the cord stretched too high, man alone has cleared the obstacle. 


Freedom, the secret of Progress 
It should not be inferred that James and Bergson are alone 
among modern thinkers in their affirmation of freedom. I have 


1 Creative Evolution, pp. 263-64 and 265. The reader will understand that 
Bergson is using the word consciousness in a different sense from that in which we 
have used it in the preceding chapters on the philosophy of mind. Bergson uses 
the word in its older and more popular meaning referring to the impulsive, crea- 
tive, and selective capacities of that total thing which we call the mind. It is 
more nearly what we should call the will. 


340 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


dwelt upon their views rather because of the prominence of these 
two men in the philosophy of the present, and because of the 
uniqueness of their positions.1. In estimating the value of this’ 
new philosophy of contingency, it must be kept in mind that it 
relates to the theoretical problem regarding the possibility of 
freedom, whether in organic evolution or in the conduct of men. 
It affirms just this possibility; it does not affirm that human ac- 
tions are always or even usually lawless and capricious and un- 
predictable. The single instance of the influence of heredity on 
the behavior of individuals would banish any such idea. The 
spirit of man certainly moves on earth ballasted with social cus- 
toms and freighted with hereditary dispositions; but that it can 
with all this burden soar aloft is attested by the whole history of 
progress and even by the fact of evolution itself. Every advance 
in life, from the first bit of protoplasm all the long way up to 
human personality, seems to be a struggle to escape from mechan- 
istic determinism and to blossom out at successive levels into 
new and marvelous forms and realities. In the Darwinian plan 
the new appears in the form of variations and mutations, and 
these furnish the materials for the advance of species. Even 
Darwin’s ‘‘struggle for existence” implies freedom. Here the 
language of determinism seems almost grotesque. We can 
think of struggle as repressed or thwarted — but not ‘‘deter- 
mined.” Even Lucretius, after Democritus the extremist of 
ancient Materialists, gave to his primordial atoms a kind of 
spontaneity. 


Terminology 

In the whole discussion about the freedom of the will confusion 
sometimes arises because we do not understand just what is 
meant by the will. And with this comes a sense of irritation and 
a feeling that the whole question is one to be referred to the psy- 
chologist. But the psychologists have not helped us greatly 

1Innumerable modern writers have taken the position of freedom, while in- 
numerable others have written on the side of determinism. One of the best 
presentations of the grounds for freedom may be found in James Ward’s The 


Realm of Ends, lectures x1, xtv. Compare also the activistic philosophy of 
Eucken, Boyce Gibson, Boutroux, and F, C. S. Schiller. 


FREEDOM 341 


here. Usually they ignore the subject. Often they dwell right- 
fully upon the direction given to our actions by our interests and 
desires and by our social customs and hereditary tendencies.! 

But the psychologists make it clear, of course, that there is no 
special faculty or element which is called the will. It is merely 
a term which may be applied to all the ‘‘activities of control.” 
The will is “‘the whole mind active.’”’ To avoid this confusion 
the worn-out expression freedom of the will should be replaced by 
some such expression as the freedom of the self, or of the person, or 
of the organism. Better still, would be the phrase freedom of the 
soul or freedom of the mind. Best of all, perhaps, as I have al- 
ready hinted, would be the plan to drop the old terms and adopt 
a new language, as is done, for instance, in the following quota- 
tion from one psychologist: 

That the human mind, in its highest flights, creates new things, 
thinks in ways that have never been thought before, seems undeniable in 
face of any of the great works of genius. Those who tell us that the 
mere shuffling of the letters of the alphabet in a dice-box will produce a 
great work of literary art, or even a single perfect verse, may be speaking 
literal truth, if we grant them the continuation of the process through 
unlimited time. But the striking peculiarity of the human race is that, 
in the last few thousand years, it has produced such things, created such 
novelties, over and over again. 

If, then, the human mind is greatly creative in its highest forms and 
flights, how can we deny that it may be creative, in a small way, in the 
moral struggles of the common man? By a long series of such creative 
acts on the part of men both great and small, the moral tradition, the 
highest product of organic evolution, has been painfully and slowly 
evolved. Why should we doubt that organic evolution is a creative 
process and that Mind is the creative agency? We have no theory of 
organic evolution remotely adequate to the problem.? 


In this brief chapter it has hardly seemed worth while to dwell 
on the controversial aspects of this old problem. Succinct state- 
ments of the various positions may be found in the books referred 
to at the end of the chapter and in the footnotes to the pages. I 
have tried to bring out some of the newer phases of the subject. 


1 Compare, for instance, James Rowland Angell, Psychology, pp. 486-37. 
2 William McDougall, Outline of Psychology (Charles Scribner’s Sons), 
pp. 447-48. 


342 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


The theory of determinism may be stated in such a way as 
to seem irrefutable. Those who love to dwell in a tidy, well- 
ordered, and unified world will prefer this philosophy — and they 
will be convinced that the law of causality applies to all material 
things, to all animal species, and to all human conduct; and they 
will define freedom as rational action or self-determination; and 
the feeling of freedom will be explained by our knowledge that 
some of the determining factors are within ourselves or products 
of our past decisions. Readers of this class will enjoy the schol- 
arly treatment of the subject found in the writings of Bernard 
Bosanquet,! §. Alexander,? J. M. E. McTaggart,? and A. E. 
Taylor. 

Those, on the other hand, in whom the logical impulse is not 
quite so strong and the spirit of adventure stronger, those who 
love a wilder and more exhilarating world, a world offering haz- 
ards and opportunities for conquest and achievement, will prefer 
a philosophy with a more radical kind of freedom; such, for in- 
stance, as that proposed in the adventurous teachings of the 
Pragmatists, or in the ethical philosophy of the Personalists, 
or in the fearless doctrine of contingency presented by James and 
Bergson and Ward. 

And yet I am sure that philosophical problems are not to be 
settled by a question of temperament, as though determinism 
could be true for you and freedom for me. The goal of philosophy 
is objective truth, although in questions such as the one now 
before us this goal may be difficult to attain. And so I think that 
the problem of freedom is not a question of temperament but 
rather a question of securing a terminology fitted to the real 
character of the problem. 

There is one suggestion made by Ward which seems fruitful. 
He also uses the term self-determination, but the meaning he gives 
to it is something quite different from that which it usually bears. 
It is the kind of determination of a ‘‘determined’’ child, or a 
“‘determined”’ man. It is this which characterizes personality. 


1 The Principle of Individuality and Value, lecture rx. 
2? Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 11, chap. x. 

3 Some Dogmas of Religion, chap. v. 

4 Elements of Metaphysics, book tv, chap. Iv. 


FREEDOM 343 


It implies efficient causation, self-direction, and purpose. It 
considers the self to be a personal agent and the activity which 
proceeds from this self to be a kind of self-expression. We have 
seen already some reasons for believing that the whole world 
movement, a part of which we speak of as evolution, is a kind of 
self-expression, as though the universal Self were trying to ex- 
press itself and “determined” to do so. 


. In connection with this chapter read: 
W. G. Everett, Moral Values (Henry Holt and Company), chap. x11. 


Gertrude Carman Bussey, Typical Recent Conceptions of Freedom (Press 
of T. Morey & Son, Greenfield, Mass.). Résumé of the views of 
Haeckel, James, Bergson, Ward, and Bosanquet on Freedom. 


Further references: 
George Herbert Palmer, The Problem of Freedom. (Houghton Mifflin 
Company.) 
Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics (Charles Scribner’s Sons), book 11, 
chap. Ix. 
W. K. Wright, A Student’s Philosophy of Religion (The Macmillan Com- 
pany), chap. xxI. 


William James, The Will to Believe (Longmans, Green and Company), 
“The Dilemma of Determinism,” pp. 145-83. 


H. Bergson, Time and Free Will. (The Macmillan Company.) See also 
his Creative Evolution (Henry Holt and Company), Index. 

F.C.S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism (The Macmillan Company), chap. 
XVIII. 


Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany), lectures x—x1. An appreciation of the freedom discovered in 
the higher idealism. 


Ralph Barton Perry, The Present Conflict of Ideals. (Longmans, Green 
and Company.) See Index. 

David Hume, Essay on Liberty and Necessity. 

G. H. Howison, The Limits of Evolution (The Macmillan Company), 
“The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom,” pp. 313-80. 

George Stuart Fullerton, A System of Metaphysics (The Macmillan Com- 
pany), chap. XXXII. 

Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (Scientific Method 
in Philosophy). (The Open Court Publishing Company.) Chap. vit. 

Henry Sturt, ‘“‘The Problem of Freedom in its Relation to Psychology,” 
in Personal Idealism, edited by Henry Sturt. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 


1 James Ward, The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and Theism, pp. 277-78. 


CHAPTER XX 
THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 


Joun Locks, probably the most influential of the classical phi- 
losophers, relates that when he was a young man he was discuss- 
ing with five or six friends gathered in his chamber certain prob- 
lems of philosophy.! They found themselves puzzled and unable 
to come to any conclusion, and finally decided that they were 
taking the wrong course, and should first set themselves to deter- 
mine the power of the human mind to deal with such problems. 
This was the origin of Locke’s celebrated book, An Essay Con- 
cerning the Human Understanding, and the beginning of the long 
modern controversy about the theory of knowledge. 

Is the human mind capable of dealing with the hard problems 
of philosophy? Does it possess some “‘faculty,”’ such as reason 
or intuition, by means of which we can go beyond the facts of 
experience and learn of the great world of reality outside of 
experience, if there be such a world? Are we not limited in our 
knowledge to what our senses reveal and do they reveal reality 
itself or just phenomena or appearances? Are we, indeed, certain 
‘that there 7s any external world? May not the appearances 
revealed through our senses be merely the projection of our own 
minds — our ideas? At the very best, is our knowledge of the 
world anything more than a relative knowledge, depending upon 
the peculiar structure of our minds and bodies? 

These various questions we have avoided until the present, 
deeming it better to adopt the method of the special sciences, 
taking for granted the reality of the external world as reported 
by the senses, and assuming the ability of the mind to know it 
and to think and reason about it. Perhaps in the past relatively 
too much attention has been given to the theory of knowledge, 
wrongly making it almost synonymous with philosophy itself, 
with the unfortunate result that important regions of truth have 
been neglected by preoccupied philosophers. 


1 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Introduction. 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 345 


Nevertheless, we cannot avoid the question any longer, and 
must, therefore, in this chapter make an inquiry as to the sources 
and validity of human knowledge. LHpzstemology is the technical 
- and somewhat awkward name that has been given to this branch 
of inquiry. It is from two Greek words, which together mean 
the science of knowledga The Theory of Knowledge is the sim- 
pler and more commonly used term. 


The two problems 

Under the general head of Theory of Knowledge two quite dis- 
tinct problems are presented. ‘The first relates to the source of 
knowledge, and introduces us to the famous dispute between the 
Empiricists and the Rationalists. The second relates to the va- 
lidity or truth of knowledge and introduces us to the still more 
famous dispute between the Realists and the Idealists. Hence 
we may divide this chapter into two sections. 


I. The Sources of Knowledge 


One of the oldest of the epistemological problems relates to the 
sources of knowledge. Each of us has a certain ‘“‘store”’ or “‘body”’ 
of knowledge, such, for instance, as of the world around us, of 
our own minds, of mathematical principles, of right and wrong, 
of goodness and beauty. Hence the question arises, Where 
did we get this knowledge? Its truth and value may depend 
upon its source. We want each bit of knowledge to show its 
credentials. 

In the history of philosophy it has been customary to say that 
all of our knowledge has come to us in one of three or four ways. 
In the traditional language of epistemology, knowledge must 
either be inborn (doctrine of innate ideas); or it must come from 
reason (rationalism) ; or it must come through the special senses, 
namely, sight, hearing, pressure, taste, smell, temperature, and 
strain (sensationalism or empiricism); or finally, it must come 
from direct insight or intuition (mysticism). To these sources 
of knowledge, a fifth has sometimes been added, namely, intro- | 
spection, by which is gained a knowledge of our own inner life. 

Sensationalism in its extreme form denies that there is any 


346 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY — 


other source of knowledge whatever than sensation; to sense- 


perception we can trace back all our store of knowledge. Sense_ 


impressions may be revived in memory, when they become ideas. 
Ideas may be associated and related, giving rise to such notions 
as those of cause and effect. An exposition of sensationalism of 
this kind may be found in the writings.of David Hume. Em- 
piricism is a term which has commonly been applied to this 
theory of knowledge. Strictly the term empiricism means that 
all knowledge comes from experience, and we shall see presently 
that experience and knowledge are much the same thing. Hence 
in the broader sense we must all be empiricists, but we shall cer- 
tainly not all be sensationalists. 

Rationalism does not deny that much of our knowledge comes 
from sense-perception, but affirms that some of it, perhaps the 


most valuable part, comes from a source transcending sense-per- ‘ 
ception, namely, from reason, or thought. Mathematics is cited — 


as an example of such a rational science. 

Finally, Mysticism, while not denying that the greater part 
of our knowledge comes from sense-perception or from reason, 
affirms that there is a still higher and purer source than either 
sensation or reason, namely, intuition,! or direct insight, or divin- 
ing sympathy, or mystic contemplation; or simply faith and 
feeling. 


The genetic approach 

Gradually in recent years these old classifications of epistemo- 
logical theories have been superseded. A more accurate psy- 
chology and a more modern logic have resulted in a shifting of 
the points of interest as regards the ‘‘sources”’ of knowledge. 
Knowledge is not something which comes in packages to be 
traced to authentic sources; ideas are not entities which can be 
built up into knowledge; there is no faculty of reason which guar- 
antees a kind of divine sanctity to its utterances; and since 
Locke’s time nobody believes in innate ideas. Innate disposi- 


1The word intuition has different meanings in philosophy., Commonly, like 
the German word, Anschauung, it means direct apprehension through sense-per- 
ception. Otherwise, it means, as in the present connection, immediate insight, 
perhaps through some mystical faculty. 


een ee 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 347 


tions, tendencies, interests, ways of reacting, we have a plenty; 
but no ready-made knowledge. | 
_ The way to a better understanding of the theory of knowledge 
is through a genetic study of the subject, beginning with the 
attitude of the simplest living organism toward its environment. 
The first thing that happens is a response of some kind to a stim- 
ulus, accompanied by a simple awareness. Indeed, this is not 
the first thing that happens either. The first thing is the or- 
ganism itself with certain new-found powers belonging only to 
living organisms and certain inborn interests which serve as 
driving forces.1. So at the very beginning we see how mean- 
ingless a theory of sensationalism or pure empiricism would be, 
affirming that all knowledge comes from sensation or experience, 
as if in Locke’s phrase the mind at birth were a blank tablet, 
upon which sense impressions made their record; as meaningless 
as the rival theory which would derive knowledge from a faculty 
of reason. 

- Thus the very simplest form of knowledge would be mere 
awareness, such as an organism has of an object affecting it. 
Very soon, however, when an organism begins to respond to a 
stimulus and then presently to respond specifically to a situation, 
the situation begins to have a meaning; it is interesting, promis- 
ing, threatening, to be avoided. Thus a relation arises which 
may be called acquaintance. Then language comes with names 
of things and events, and abstract terms, and classes, and judg- 
ment, and reasoning. 

Pursuing the subject psychologically in this way we see that 
there is no faculty called reason that oracularly hands down 
something called knowledge, as Rationalism used to teach; nor 
any transcendental a priori laws of thought which experience 
presupposes, as apriorism used to teach; nor, on the other hand, 
are there any such things as simple sensations considered as units 
of knowledge, which could be combined or built up into a body 
of knowledge. What we have rather is an organism with pro- 
found interests and propensities exploring a hostile and a friendly 


1 This will all be much clearer if the reader will turn back here and review 
the philosophy of mind as set forth in Chapter XVII. 


$48 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


world and interacting with its environment. The result is ex- 
perience; and this experience may be funded, drawn upon in 


specific new situations, and these situations may be intelligently © 


dealt with, controlled, mastered. Evidently it is this funded 
experience which we call knowledge, later classified, expressed in 
language, codified into the shorthand of scientific terms. Know- 
ledge, therefore, is experience rationalized; that is, organized. 
Empiricism and Rationalism thus lay aside their historic rivalry 
and join friendly hands. 

John Dewey and his associates have enlightened us not a little 
about the real nature of knowledge by studying it in its genetic 
stages. This is what Dewey says: 


The interaction of organism and environment, resulting in some adap- 
tation which secures utilization of the latter, is the primary fact, the 
basic category. Knowledge is relegated to a derived position, second- 
ary in origin, even if its importance, when once it is established, is over- 
shadowing. Knowledge is not something separate and self-sufficing, 
but is involved in the process by which life is sustained and evolved. 
The senses lose their place as gateways of knowing to take their rightful 
place as stimuli to action. To an animal an affection of the eye or ear 
is not an idle piece of information about something indifferently going 
on in the world. It is an invitation and inducement to act in a needed 
way. Itisa clue in behavior, a directive factor in adaptation of life in 
its surroundings. It is urgent not cognitive in quality. The whole 
controversy between empiricism and rationalism as to the intellectual 
worth of sensations is rendered strangely obsolete. The discussion of 
sensations belongs under the head of immediate stimulus and response, 
not under the head of knowledge... . 

The rationalist was thus right in denying that sensations as such are 
true elements of knowledge. But the reasons he gave for this conclusion 


and the consequences he drew from it were all wrong. Sensations are! 


| 


not parts of any knowledge, good or bad, superior or inferior, imperfect — 


or complete. They are rather provocations, incitements, challenges to 
an act of inquiry which is to terminate in knowledge. They are not ways 
of knowing things inferior in value to reflective ways, to the ways that 
require thought and inference, because they are not ways of knowing at 
all. They are stimuli to reflection and inference. As interruptions 
they raise the questions: What does this shock mean? What is happen- 
ing? What is the matter? How is my relation to the environment dis- 


turbed? What should be done about it? How shall I alter my course » 


of action to meet the change that has taken place in the surroundings? 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 349 


How shall I readjust my behavior in response? Sensation is thus, as the 
sensationalist claimed, the beginning of knowledge, but only in the 
sense that the experienced shock of change is the necessary stimulus to 
the investigating and comparing which eventually produce knowledge.! 


This statement shows very clearly how knowledge arises, and 
“we see that it is better to inquire as to the conditions of know- 
ledge than its sources. Its conditions are a self with certain innate 
interests, an environment with which the self enters into rela- 
tions, an intelligence that can fund, capitalize, and organize this 
experience and deal effectively with new and complicated situa- 
tions. Knowledge is funded experience, but in the funding pro- 
cess mental powers and activities are the significant things — 
memory, thought, conceptual analysis, reflection, selective or- 
ganization, creative synthesis. Knowledge is therefore not some- 
thing which drifts in from a ready-made world in the form of im- 
pressions, as the old Sensationalism taught; nor is it the distilled 
product of certain a prior? universal principles of thought, as the 
older Rationalism taught. It is a product of the interaction of 
the self and the environment, in which the remarkable powers of 
the self are the most significant factors. Hence it is not neces- 
sary to assume any a priori, super-empirical ‘‘categories”’ or prin- 
ciples of knowledge. Previous to the experience of the individ- 
ual there are, to be sure, certain innate tendencies learned in 
the process of evolution through actual contact with the envi- © 
ronment and actual success in dealing with it. If a priori be 
taken to mean racial habits of dealing with experience and 
organizing it, then indeed we may believe in a priorz elements in 
knowledge. 


But knowledge is also contemplative 

This genetic account of knowledge is of the greatest value in 
giving us an insight into its real nature; but it is a little one-sided 
because it overemphasizes the instrumental character of the 
mind. The intelligence that is described is primarily that of the 
animal which has a practical problem to solve, probably that of 


1 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Henry Holt and Company), 
pp. 87, 89, 90. 


350 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


getting food or outwitting an enemy. But even the animal has 
an instinct of curiosity, and in man the desire for knowledge fe 
its own sake is very strong. 

There is, then, another kind of knowledge than the experimen- 
tal. Granting that sensations are primarily stimuli to action,’ 
they may also serve other ends — they may be revelations. 
They may serve our scientific interests, our desire merely to 
know. Sensations need not be always “urgent.” They may be 
suggestive of external reality, leading to thought and scientific 
hypothesis, which in the end may result in discoveries concerning 
the actual structure of the world. They may, indeed, be revela- 
tory of external reality itself. The world is intelligible as well as 
plastic; and present in intuition as well as intelligible. What 
Dewey calls knowledge may indeed change and mould and mod- 
ify its objects, but there is a knowledge which is merely contem- 
plative. The stars in the heavens are not changed by being 
known, except in the puerile sense of entering into a new external 
relation. As Leighton so well says: 


The functions of consciousness and reason are not exhausted in meet- 
ing novel situations and controlling behavior by a reference to the 
future. When I am engaged in esthetic contemplation of nature or art, 
when I am enjoying the companionship of a friend, when I am contem- 
plating the logical symmetry, beauty and impersonal grandeur of some 
scientific or mathematical construction, when I am living in some sig- 
nificant period of the past, for example Elizabethan England or the 
Athens of Pericles, when I am following the career and feeling myself 
into the life of some one of the race’s worldly or spiritual heroes, my con- 
sciousness, keen, vivid and expanding, may have no reference to my own 
future behavior or that of any one else. The human spirit lives not by 
deeds of adjustment to external and future situations alone. It lives 
deeply in pure contemplation and free imagination. The instrumen- 
talist errs by taking one important function of conscious intelligence and 
making it the sole function. Disinterested contemplation and enjoy- 
ment of the beauty, grandeur, meaning and order of things for their own 
sakes are for some human beings inherently worthful functions of con- 
sciousness. 


If this view seems quite opposed to the pragmatic account 


1 Joseph Alexander Leighton, The Field of Philosophy (D. Appleton and Com- 
pany), p. 360. 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 351 


given by Dewey, perhaps the reconciliation may be found just in 
this, that, while thinking was at first instrumental, it has finally 
become an end or value in itself. As bluntly stated by Montague, 
‘Man began to think in order that he might eat, he has evolved 
to the point where he eats in order that he may think.” ! 

Thus the ancient dispute between the Empiricists and the 
Rationalists seems much softened and need not detain us longer 
here; nor need we dwell further on the theory called Sensatzonal- 
ism. Knowledge is organized experience and experience includes 
both stimulus and response, and in the process of organization, 
memory, thought, and reasoning are all involved. It may be 
well, however, for us to linger a little longer on that theory of 
knowledge called Rationalism. 


Other forms of Rationalism 

In the history of philosophy the word Rationalism has had 
many different meanings. Sometimes it means merely that 
knowledge gained by reflective thought is of a higher and truer 
kind than that which is gained through sense-perception. We 
have seen, of course, that this whole contrast is misleading, but 
to the ancient Greeks, and especially to Plato, it seemed very 
important. Plato distrusted that illusory knowledge which is | 
gained through the senses, and prized beyond measure that which - 
proceeds from logical analysis, dialectic, and rational inquiry. 
Mathematics, he thought, was a type of such perfect knowledge. 
The human soul is at home in the realm of Ideas, almost super- 
natural in their worth and dignity. If truth is what we seek, it is 
better for you and me to sit down in a quiet place with abundant 
leisure and reason it all out. In such an enterprise the God-given 
rational powers of the mind may be trusted. We shall gain in 
this way a truer insight into reality than if we go seeing and hear- 
ing and touching and tasting and smelling in the changing world 
of material things around us. The latter method will give us 
just opinion, not science. 

It is hard, indeed, to exaggerate the power of the mind in re- 
flective thinking, and it was this power which Plato was exalting; 

1 Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Sct. Meth., vol. v1, p. 489. 


352 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


yet in correcting the error of a purely sensational philosophy he 
went too far in disparaging the value of sense-perception. Like 
all the Greeks he(failed to understand the importance of check- 
ing up his reflections by an appeal to the data of experience} but 
Plato understood, as we now understand, the power of creative 
thought, which has given us the great things in the world’s his- 
tory, not merely in literature, art, philosophy, and morals, but 
in science itself. 

Another form of Rationalism is represented by the seven-' 
teenth-century school of Continental thinkers, particularly Des- 
cartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. ‘These great philosophers lived in 
the dawning age of mathematics and mechanics, and the deduc- 
tive method of these sciences seemed to them the only perfect 
method. Spinoza undertook to reduce philosophy to a purely 
deductive discipline, resting like geometry upon certain axioms 
and definitions. | Knowledge has its source in universal and nec- 
essary principles, which may be intuitively discovered by the 
mind. Whatever the mind apprehends with perfect clearness 
and distinctness is true. Hence we have only to discover in this 
way the body of intuitive truth, and draw out its implications, 
when, behold, not only are the principles of mathematics and 
logic, but also those of metaphysics, ethics, esthetics, and other 
branches of knowledge, made known to us. 

Rationalists of this school were confirmed in their trust in this 
method by the remarkable results which it yielded when applied 
to certain branches of science, such as physics, dynamics, and 
celestial mechanics. It was easy to see, however, to what dog- 
matism this kind of Rationalism would lead, and Kant repudi- 
ated it for this reason. It seems to rest upon the belief in a kind 
of superphysical realm of rational principles with which the 
human mind is en rapport, and which determine from the begin- 
ning what kind of world shall actually be. It seems to assume 
that logical and mathematical truths are existences which just 
simply have to be discovered or discerned. It is at present be- 
lieved that mathematics is not an existential science. Mathe- 
matical truths are not discovered; they are deduced; that is, they 
follow as implications from certain assumptions. Knowledge, 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 353 


therefore, is not something unwound from a ball or skein, or 
drawn off from an already filled reservoir. This kind of Ration- 
alism did not realize the creative power of the mind in knowledge. 
Knowledge was merely a process of apprehending clearly and dis- 
tinctly principles of reason already existing. In its later forms 
it exalted Reason as some sort of mystical faculty of perceiving 
these absolute and unchanging laws. 

On the other hand, it is possible to make the mind too impor- 
tant in determining the form that knowledge shall take. This led 
in the case of Kant to another kind of Rationalism as bad as that 
from which he was so desperately trying to escape. Instead of 
having the rationality of the world imposed upon it from above, 

(Kant supposed that the mind itself imposes upon the world all 
the rationality and all the order that is found there.’ Both Time 
and Space and all the categories, including causality and sub- 
stance, are just forms of the mind; they are laws of thought, not 
laws of things. It was not in emphasizing the activity of the 
mind and its creative power that Kant made his mistake, but in 
thinking of mind as lending to nature all its rationality and order. 
He thought that nature itself is the product of the understanding. 


The new Rationalism 

' Philosophy of the present time, so far as it is rationalistic — 
and it is so to a considerable extent — follows none of these older 
forms, least of all that of Kant. The world is through and 
through rational and orderly, quite independent of that particular 
part of reality which we call the mind. The mind is a product of 
nature, has grown up with it, is at home in it, partakes of its 
rationality, but understands and appreciates only a part of its 
limitless riches. Knowledge is a selective process, choosing those 
aspects of reality which it can make use of, appreciate, or under- 
~ stand. It gets, perhaps, only glimpses of the whole of reality, 
but its vision so far as it extends is not illusory. Mathematical 
and logical truths are not drawn down from a heavenly kingdom 
where they have reigned in majestic isolation from eternity; they 
are involved in the very structure of the Universe. The order in 
the world and the rationality are objective, are there to be seen, 


354 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


felt, and enjoyed. The real world is logical and mathematical, 
and the mind is just a part of this real world, has grown up with 
it, and lays hold of every aspect of it which it can use and appre- 
ciate. Yes, and I think that it lays hold not only of the logical 
and mathematical realities of the world but also of its moral and 
sesthetic realities — its goodness and its beauty, its “‘objective 
significant structures.”’ ! 

So, then, knowledge comes neither from the senses nor from 
reason. We may say that it comes from experience, but experi- 
ence means, in Mr. Santayana’s well-chosen words, ‘‘so much of : 
knowledge and readiness as is fetched from contact with events 
by a teachable and intelligent creature; it is a fund of wisdom 
gathered by living in familiar intercourse with things.” 

The new Rationalism emphasizes not merely the objective 
reality of logical relations, but also the importance of the con- 
structive and creative power of the mind in the acquisition of 
knowledge. It is very far from returning to any theory of Sen- 
sationalism. Consider, for instance, the case of the scientist at 
work in his laboratory. It is indeed a laboratory rather than an 
observatory. The fruitful contributions to knowledge that come 
from it are the results of intelligent labor rather than of passive 
sense-perception. The very building in which the apparatus is 
housed is planned for its special purpose. The discovery of the 
best method, the formation of an hypothesis from which to work, 
the planning of the experiment, the designing and setting up of 
the apparatus, the computation of the results — all these are 
the significant things, and they are the work of the mind. And 
yet it is just as true that none of this labor would avail unless in» 
the end observation of the event, of the objective fact, were accu- 
rately and impartially made and truly recorded. 

So in conclusion we see how our modern conception of the 

1T refer again to George P. Adams’s book, Idealism and the Modern Age, 
which should be read as a corrective of a certain onesidedness in the pragmatic 
theory of knowledge. Read especially Chapter VI in connection with Chap- 
ter V. Professor Adams seems to think that this view is inconsistent with an 
emergent theory of mind, evidently fearing that whatever emerges from the 
body must be very “‘bodily.’”? But what if some original interest or desire for 


righteousness and beauty is achieving the vision of them by means of the body, 
as life is achieved by means of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen? 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 355 


mind simplifies the whole subject of knowledge. We can forget 
all about a faculty of reason, and in place of it substitute the 
power of creative thinking. Of the latter James Harvey Robin- 
son says: 

It is this kind of thought that has raised man from his pristine, sub- 
savage ignorance and squalor to the degree of knowledge and comfort 
which he now possesses. On his capacity to continue and greatly ex- 
tend this kind of thinking depends his chance of groping his way out of 
the plight in which the most highly civilized peoples of the world now 
find themselves. In the past this type of thinking has been called Rea- 
son. But so many misapprehensions have grown up around the word 
that some of us have become very suspicious of it. I suggest, therefore, 
that we substitute a recent name and speak of ‘‘creative thought” 
rather than of Reason. For this kind of meditation begets knowledge, and 
knowledge ts really creative inasmuch as it makes things look different from 
what they seemed before and may indeed work for their reconstruction. 


It is rational thinking which has marked every advance in the 
history of mankind, not merely in science and invention, but 
especially in morals and manners and civilization. 


IT. The Truth and Validity of Knowledge 


This is the second problem in the Theory of Knowledge and is 
quite distinct from the one we have been discussing. It is not 
a question of where our knowledge comes from, but whether it is” 
valid when we get it. In its general form it is the problem of the 
relation of our ideas to the world of reality. It introduces us to 
the famous dispute between the Realist and the Idealist. The 
alternative theories of Realism and Idealism now confront us 
and in this epistemological discussion these two words are used 
in different senses from those in which they were used in theo- 
ries of ontology. The problem which we have now to discuss is 
simply the question whether the world is in itself a distinct in- 
dependent reality, or whether it is just a_ reflection of our own 
minds, an idea, a perception, a mental construction. To the 
former belief the word Realism ? is applied; to the latter, the term 
Idealism. 


1 James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Making (Harper and Brothers), 
p. 49. 
2 The word Realism as well as the word Idealism is ambiguous, having quite 


356 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Subjectivism 

Idealism of this kind is sometimes called Subjective Idealism 
or Subjectivism, to distinguish it from Objective or Metaphysical 
Idealism, which is a theory of ontology, not of epistemology, and 
which we have discussed in a former chapter. The latter, we 
remember, is the theory that, although the objective world is 
real and independent of the perceiving mind, nevertheless, in 
its inner nature it is psychical, mental, or spiritual; and we re- 
call also that this view was sometimes called Spzritualism, since 
the word Idealism, as we now see, is ambiguous. It is very 
important to keep this distinction carefully in mind and not 
confuse this Subjectivism or epistemological Idealism, which 
we are now to study, with the various forms of objective 
Idealism, such for instance as that of Plato or any of the 
numerous modern systems of this kind. Any impatience 
which we may perhaps feel with Subjectivism should not be 
carried over to the more helpful and dignified forms of Ideal- 
ism teaching that in the objective world which we all believe 
exists around us and above us, the essential and abiding things 
are mind or spirit or eternal values. Whether the latter view 
be true or false, its truth is not dependent upon any form of 
subjective Idealism. 

It is only since the time of Berkeley that the difficulty has 
arisen about the independent reality of what is called the external 
world. The naive belief of mankind is that the world of objects’ 
around us, such as trees, mountains, and rivers, really exists very 
much as we see it, quite independent of the perceiving mind. 
Reference has already been made in preceding chapters to Bishop 
Berkeley’s “‘strange’”’ philosophy, which taught that there is no 
such reality as inert matter existing apart from our perception. 
This seems so absurd to most of us that we can hardly appreciate 
the strength of Berkeley’s position until we have read his own 
arguments in his own charming and persuasive style. Fortu- 
nately these are readily accessible in his Principles of Human 


another meaning than the present one. In this other meaning it is often called 
Platonic Realism, and refers to the belief that concepts, general notions, univer- 
sals are real entities, not just names. In this sense Realism is opposed to Nom- 
inalism. 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 357 


Knowledge, published in 1710, and in a more popular form in his 
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. 


It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, 
mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, 
natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understand- 
ing. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this 
principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his 
heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve 
a manifest contradiction. For, what are the forementioned objects but 
the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our 
own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of 
these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived? ! 


But they have no such distinct existence, being merely our own 
ideas. In Berkeley’s celebrated phrase, esse est percipi, to be is 
to be perceived. 


Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man 
need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to 
be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word 
all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not 
any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or 
known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by 
me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they 
must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some 
Eternal Spirit —it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the 
absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an 
existence independent of a spirit. [To be convinced of which, the reader 
need only reflect, and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a 
sensible thing from its being perceived.] ? 


It is probable that this controversy between the Realist and 
the Idealist has received more attention in the history of modern 
philosophy than it deserved. ‘There is at the present time a. 
strong realistic reaction against all forms of Subjectivism and a 
tendency to return to a “common-sense” view. Berkeley’s. 
Idealism is not, however, refuted by an appeal to common sense, 
any more than it was by the argument of Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
who in Berkeley’s own day struck his foot with mighty force 


1 George Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge (Open Court Pub- 
lishing Company), part I, sec. 4. 
2 George Berkeley, op. cit., part 1, sec. 6, 


358 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


against a stone till he rebounded, saying, “‘I refute it thus!” ! For 
all that was given in Dr. Johnson’s own experience was a group 
of visual and muscular sensations and possibly a pain, which he > 
located in his toe. Whether the controversy is fruitless or not, 
a short outline of the argument must here be given. It is a kind 
of initiation, which every aspirant to a knowledge of philosophy 
must go through. 


The ego-centric predicament 
The difficulty which arises between the Realist and the Idealist 
has sometimes been called the ego-centric predicament.2, What 
we mean when we say that a thing exists, say a tree, is that it is. 
perceived. So said Berkeley. For, just as soon as you try to 
think of it as not perceived, you are still thinking of it; it is a 
thought object. ‘Try to think of the tree as an existence in itself, 
unperceived by any mind. You still think of it as having certain 
sense qualities; it is green, or hard, or rough. It is an object of 
ideal perception. Hence fwe can never know what objects are‘ 
in themselves — only what they are as perceived; perhaps they 
_are nothing but perceptions. Possibly there are no objects inde- 
pendent of the perceiving mind; possibly they are merely pro- 
jections of the mind, like the forms I see and the voices I hear 
inmy sleep. But 7zf I think of them as independent objects, I am 
still thinking of them as they would be perceived. I think of | 
them, for instance, as colored, and yet color depends upon an eye. 
I think of them as making noise or sound, and yet sound and ~ 
noise depend upon the ear. Roses would not be red apart from — 
the seeing eye, nor fragrant apart from the sensing nose, nor 
beautiful apart from the appreciating mind. | 
Hence the ego-centric predicament. An object in order to bel 
known is an object known; it is in a cognitive relation to the — 
knowing subject. What it would be out of this relation there — 
is no telling, for just as soon as you approach it to find out what 
it is, it enters into a cognitive relation to you. It is always an 
object known, not an independent thing in itself. ; 





1 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by Glover, London, 1901, vol. 1, p. 313. 
2 The phrase is to be credited to Ralph Barton Perry. 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 359 


The effect of this argument upon any one hearing it for-the 
first time is to cause first incredulity and then exasperation. 
One tries to answer Berkeley by saying that it is nonsense to 
affirm that the rose does not exist unless perceived. Suppose the 
rose lies upon the table and we all go out of the room. Does it. 
not then continue to exist? To which Berkeley patiently re- 
plies — What do you mean by existence in this case? Name 
some quality that such an existing rose would have. When you 
do so, you mention some sense quality, such as red, white, large, 
small, or fragrant. All the qualities of the rose are simply sense 
data. 

But the reader is unconvinced by this-reasoning and proposes 
to offer a proof for the reality of the external object in this way: 
A given thing, say a rose, is seen, not by one person, but by 
many. It might, to be sure, be a phantasm of my own, so far as 
IT am concerned; but if I can call in another person to testify that 
he, too, sees the rose, then it must be there. But this argument 
fails, because you have no more evidence that the other person 
exists than you have that the rose exists. The other person is 
known to you only through sense-perception; you can see him 
and hear him and touch him, but in the end he is nothing more 
than the sum of certain sensations. Some sensory nerve is 
stimulated, some brain center is excited, some perception 
results. + 

The situation begins to get desperate. How do I know that 
there is any world at all? How do I know that there is anything 
in the Universe except myself and my impressions or ideas? To 
this extreme form of Subjective Idealism, which affirms that I 
alone exist, the name Solipsism has been given, from the Latin 
- Solus and ipse, meaning myself alone. Berkeley did not hold this 


1 Berkeley attempted to show that our knowledge of other minds, other per- 
sons, is not quite the same as our knowledge of bodies and material objects. He 
said that we perceive the physical object, but have a notion of other minds. This 
was a forlorn endeavor, and the distinction has little worth. More recent writers 
have tried to show in other ways that we have a more direct or a different kind 
of knowledge of other minds than we have of physical objects. For instance, it 
is said that I feel the power of your will or personality controlling me or coming 
into conflict with my will. Apart from mystical or telepathic influences the argu- 
ment seems to have little weight. 


7 


360 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


view. I doubt whether it should ever have been dignified by the 
creation of a Latin name for it. It is the reductio ad absurdum of 
this kind of Idealism. 


Objections and answers 

At this point the reader may say, “ Wait, I am not convinced 
of Berkeley’s position; I am not even convinced that his argu- 
ment is sound. I see two weaknesses in it. In the first place, \ 
physical science tells us about the external world. If there were 
no material world around us, what is it that science studies? No 
scientist would listen to Berkeley’s claim that there is no such 


thing as matter.”” But this objection, again, has little weight. | 


Berkeley did not deny that the objects which science studies 
exist, but that they exist independent of the perceiving mind. 
We must not forget what is meant by the word exist. ‘The rose 
and the tree and the human body and all the things studied by 
science are perceptions, objects of experience. As such, they are 
objects of scientific study, and the scientist does not need to 
trouble himself with any metaphysical questions as to the rela- 
tion of these objects of experience to some reality beyond per- 
ception. Indeed, very distinguished scientists have expressly 
taught that the objects of science are merely phenomena, just 
objects of perception, bundles of sensations, or “complexes of 
sense data.’ } 

The second weakness in Berkeley’s position, continues the 


doubter, is this: ‘‘Suppose we grant that objects of experience, ! — 


such as roses, trees, houses, are Just ‘complexes of sense data,’ or 
perceptions, nevertheless, the perceptions must have a cause. . 
Objects come and go quite against my will or expectation. They 
break in most unpleasantly sometimes upon my train of thought. 
How could they do this if they were merely subjective, just. 
phantasms of the mind? There must therefore be some objec-. 
tive cause or source of these perceptions; and, furthermore, if 


we may be allowed to accept the existence of other minds, as 


1 Compare Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science; Ernst Mach, The Analysis 
of Sensations; and Bertrand Russell, ‘‘Our Knowledge of the External World,” | 
chap. 111 in his Scientific Method in Philosophy. Compare also Huxley’s apprecia- 


tion of Berkeley’s position in Huxley’s book entitled Hume. 





THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 361 


Berkeley does, the objective source of the perceptions must be 
something abiding and persisting, affecting all minds alike.” - 

This difficulty is more serious than the others and must be care- 
fully considered. Objectivity of some kind is certainly revealed 
by this demand for a cause of our perceptions. Berkeley, Kant, 
and all the Subjectivists recognize this demand and provide for 
it. We shall be interested to learn how they do this. Kant’s 
solution is the easiest to grasp, if not the most convincing — 
and may be examined first. 

It is true, said Kant, that our sensations must have a cause and 
that this cause must be outside the mind. We will, therefore, 
recognize the existence of such a cause as absolutely necessary. 
It is the unknown Thing in Itself (Ding an sich). It is not even 
in time or space, because, as we recall, time and space are sub- 
jective. Science can tell us nothing about this ultimate reality, 
for science deals with phenomena, things as they appear to us, 
conditioned by the nature of our sense organs and the consti- 
tution of the mind. 

The world, then, according to Kant, the world of science as‘ 
well as of familiar everyday perception, is a mental construct or 
creation. The understanding makes nature. It does not, to be 
sure, make it out of nothing. The raw material is given in sen- 
sation, but the whole form and structure of it, its whole texture, 
even its temporal and spatial character, are all contributed by 
the mind. What is given to us in sensation is a chaotic manifold 
only; all that makes the world orderly, coherent, having form, 
meaning, structure, comes from the peculiar constitution of the 
mind. Since all objects of knowledge are phenomena, we may 
call Kant’s theory Phenomenalism, rather than complete Sub; 
jective Idealism. | 

Berkeley’s own solution of the difficulty is quite different and 
seems very strange to one who hears it for the first time. There 
is, we remember, no such thing as matter in the sense of an objec- 
tive inert substance. Things are just perceptions; but some ob- 
jective cause of my perceptions there must of course be. Matter 
being inert could not, even if it existed, be the cause of my per- 
ceptions. Perceptions being mental states could only proceed 


362 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


from a spiritual source, an active will, a divine will. What we 
call the world of natural objects is, therefore, the regular and sys- 
tematic operation of God, the infinite spirit, upon a society of. 
finite spirits; that is, upon human minds. 

._At first sight this introduction of God as the cause of our ideas, 
instead of an external material reality, seems a lame and forced 
explanation. It seems a fitting climax to an absurd system. But 
Berkeley had an exasperating ability in defending his position, 
and this last hypothesis may be less unreasonable than it sounds. 
If Berkeley were here to defend his philosophy, and if he were 
acquainted with the results of recent science in its investigation 
of the nature of matter, he might reason as follows: ‘You say 
that something called matter is the cause of your sensations. 
Well, what is matter? It has been reduced to units of energy, 
dancing and vibrating electrons, as far from one another rela- 
tively to their size as the planets. What do you know about this 
energy as regards its quality? Nothing; it is the capacity for 
doing work. You assume, then, that something, almost an z, 
which you call matter, exists, and that it is perhaps nothing more 
than a form of energy, and that this energy working upon your 
organs of sense gives rise to those various sensations which you 
call heat or light or sound or impact, making up your world.” 

“Very well,” continues Berkeley, ‘‘now tell me whether your 
theory is any better than mine or, indeed, very different. You 
say that the only reality outside the perceiving mind is a world 
of energy, the nature of which is unknown, operating upon the 
mind. I say that the only reality outside the mind is God, who! . 
causes the perceptions. If this view seems absurd to you, it is 
because you do not think of God in the right way. God is an » 
omnipresent, all-encompassing, divine energy, revealing himself | 
to us in those multiform impressions which make up our world of 
objects. The only difference in our two positions is that you call _ 
this encompassing energy material, while I call it spiritual; but 
since you admittedly do not know anything about your material 
energy except that it is the capacity for effecting changes, the 
advantage is all in favor of calling it, as I do, spiritual energy, or 
God: for then we can understand how its operation is rational, 





THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 363 


orderly, and progressive. ‘Try, for instance, to explain in your 
way the beauties of nature or the wonders of evolution.” 

Certainly Berkeley’s philosophy works out in a strange way. 
He seems to have found some objective world after all, only he 
calls it God, while others call it matter. One cannot but wonder 
whether Berkeley’s view is so far wrong. The beauty of the sun- 
set, mountain, cloud, and sea, the exquisite perfection of the 
microscopic world, the almost miraculous order of nature as 
shown in animal instincts, in the marvels of evolution, in varia- 
tion, in heredity, in the mystery of life itself — all these make 
it reasonable, indeed, to say that the living energy, which sur- 
rounds us on every side, acting as stimulus to our sense organs, 
is God. If any one were to urge as a further objection to this 
philosophy that it is Pantheism, since it reduces the world to 
God, Berkeley could reply that it is not Pantheism, since he ex- 
pressly affirms the reality, independence, freedom, and respon- 
sibility of finite minds or human souls. Perhaps the greater 
error in Berkeley’s philosophy is to be found, not in this onto- 
logical part; but in his theory of knowledge. 


Criticism of Subjectivism 

Such, then, is the famous epistemological Idealism which 
teaches that the world ismy idea. It seems to resist all ordinary 
methods of attack, but, as carried out to its final conclusions 
by Berkeley himself, leads to nothing very startling nor very 
strange. But the question arises whether it really is so impreg- 
nable a philosophy as it seems — whether there may not be some 
initial assumptions in it which are unnecessary or even false. 

There is a ‘‘catch”’ about the ego-centric predicament, which 
has been pointed out again and again by recent writers. It does 
not follow that, because the things which I know exist in a cog- 
nitive relation to me, they cannot exist also without this relation. 
You say that the rose or the tree is my idea, and that anything 
at all which I approach with a view of knowing it becomes some- 
thing known, or anidea. Well, if that be true it does not follow 
that the rose or the tree might not exist in other relations. If it 
be true that I cannot know anything about things not experi- 


364 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


enced, it does not follow that there are no unexperienced things. 
Let us make the supposition that there is a world of reality quite 
independent of human experience, say a material world, a world 
of nature objects, a world, if you please, of green trees and brown 
mountains and blue sky. The postulate is permissible. Then 
let us suppose that sensitive organisms should arrive, perceptive 
minds, reasoning men. They could surely prove to their own 
delight that all the trees and mountains and other objects 
were just bundles of sensations, ‘complexes of sense data.’ But 
by hypothesis this conclusion would be false. So we can, at any 
rate, make the postulate that there is a real objective world inde- | 
pendent of our perceptions. Science usually makes this postu-_ 
late, and when made it is found to yield satisfactory results. _ 
Incidentally it conforms to common sense. 

But there is a more serious error underlying the whole sub- 
jectivist theory, an error so fundamental as to cause a feeling of _ 
indignation that it could have been imposed upon so many gener- 
ations of students of philosophy. It goes back to John Locke, 
who said that knowledge is the perception of the agreement or 
disagreement of two ideas. For instance, the knowledge that 
the rose is red is the recognition of the agreement between the 
ideas ‘‘rose”’ and ‘‘red.”’ Locke’s notion seemed to be that there 
are certain things or entities in the mind, which he called ideas, 
and that then this entity, called the mind, surveys these 
ideas and recognizes their agreement or disagreement, such 
recognition being knowledge. It is this false psychology which. 
has done so much mischief in epistemology. In modern psy- 
chology this error has been perpetuated through the misunder- 
standing that arises in the use of such terms as sensations, states 
of mind, and states of consciousness, in which these things of sub- 
jective interest only have been confused with the sense qualities 
of objects. Then the red of the rose, the blue of the sky, and 
the brown of the mountains have been called sensations or men- 
tal or conscious states, instead of being called, as they should be, 
qualities of objects. 

The account of knowledge already given in this chapter, when 
we were discussing the sources of knowledge, removes miany of 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 365 


these difficulties and leads to a kind of common-sense Realism. 
Knowledge is not the recognition of the agreement or disagree- 
ment of ideas, but the direct experience of things. It arises in 
the interaction between a percipient organism and a thing per- 
ceived. In its simplest form it is a mere awareness of an object. 
An amceba, for instance, comes in contact with something which 
may or may not be available for food. It becomes aware of it. 
After repeated contacts an elementary memory leads to recog- 
nition. The object is appropriated or avoided. The amceba 
has had experience, knowledge. Surely there is nothing very 
mysterious about knowledge when we consider it in this way — 
and it certainly involves, not only a perceiving subject, but an 
object perceived. It presupposes a world external to the per- 
ceiving organism; that is, a real world, having real qualities, 
existing with its qualities before it is known, and when known 
coming into a new relation — a relation with a knowing mind. 

Now, in the case of human knowledge we have a complex 
~ environment in interaction with a complex organism and the 
character of the knowledge is determined by the nature of 
both. Since the perceptive organism is itself a very complex 
affair, having a certain limited number of sense organs receptive 
to only certain kinds of stimuli; using these stimuli primarily, 
not as gateways to knowledge, but as incentives to action; hav- 
ing the power of memory adding associative elements to what 
is given in sense-perception; and having peculiar needs with 
likes and dislikes, the question is, of course, always coming up 
whether the. knowledge which such an organism has of its en- 
vironment is an ‘‘accurate’’ knowledge. Hence arise all the dis- 
cussions with which the literature of epistemology has been bur- 
dened; for example, about illusory experience, truth and error, 
and the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. 
We hear much about the straight stick appearing bent in the 
water, and the converging parallel rails, and about secondary 
qualities belonging not to things, but only to minds.!. But the 


1Tt was said by Locke, and before Locke by Galileo, and even by Democritus 
in ancient Greece, that while certain qualities, such as solidity, motion, and ex- 
tension (the so-called primary qualities) belong really to the object, certain other 


366 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


laws of light will explain why the straight stick appears bent 
in the water and why the parallel rails appear to converge; and 
there are many now who do not think it necessary to regard as 
subjective such qualities as color and sound, but only to re- 
member that different qualities of objects are revealed under 
different conditions.! Perhaps the simplest solution of this 
ancient problem is the best. We may still believe that the 
world which we know — a world of objects existing in space 
and time, a world of causal relations, a world of color and sound, 
a world of proportion and beauty —is not a world which we 
create in knowing, or which is changed by being known, but a 
world which has existed all the time and which has created us, | 
the knowers. The objective world, then, is real, and our know- 
ledge of it is true even if partial; and this true knowledge of the. 
world is constantly being enlarged by the application of scientific . 
methods of investigation. 


|.) Types of Realism 

This discussion of Realism and Idealism should not be con- 
cluded without some reference to recent realistic schools. This 
may be prefaced by a notice of some older forms of Realism. A 
realistic world view is the natural one, and the plain man takes 
it for granted. Unless, however, he has some knowledge of physi- 

ology and psychology, he is apt to hold it in too naive a form. 
_ Naive Realism is the name given to the view carelessly held — 
by the unthinking man, who may believe, perhaps, that the eyes 
are windows through which some inner eye gazes at the real - 
world and sees it just as it is; or, again, that the mind is a kind 
of tablet upon which is impressed through sense-perception a 
copy or picture of the world without. When we study the strue- 
ture of the brain and the organs of sense and the pathways of the 
sensory nerves, we begin to understand the naiveté of these first 
views and so proceed to examine more critically the way that 
knowledge arises. This leads to some form of Critical Realism, 


qualities, such as color, sound, taste, and smell (the so-called secondary qualities), 
do not belong to objects really, but are subjective, existing only in the mind. 
* Compare A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, chaps. 1 and 1, 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 367 


which in its broader meaning is the attempt to reconstruct a sci- 
entific Realism based on a more accurate physiology and psy- 
chology. 

An early attempt of this kind was made by Locke, whose view 
is called Representative Realism. 'This holds that the real ex- 
ternal world consists merely of material particles in motion and 
that our ideas of the qualities of matter merely represent these 
qualities, and, indeed, even then represent only such primary 
qualities as motion and figure, while such secondary qualities as 
color and sound exist only in the mind, their objective source 
being some form of matter in motion. Such a Realism tends, as 
we have seen, toward some kind of Phenomenalism or Subjective 
Idealism. » Herbert Spencer, again, proposed a form of Realism 
which he called T'ransfigured Realism. 'The external world is a 
world of matter, motion, and force; but as revealed to us through 
perception it is transfigured, as the image of a cube is transfigured 
in a mirror. 


The New Realism 

Lately a new form of Realism has appeared in America and in 
England called The New Realism, or Neo-Realism, heralded by a 
school of vigorous writers.! It representsareturn to the common- 
sense doctrine of a real objective world directly known in percep- 
tion. Knowledge is not mediated by any mental state, idea, or. 
sensation. Real objects are directly presented in knowledge. | 
In the act of knowing, the object of knowledge is not an idea or 
sensation which is considered as a copy or representation of an 
outer object, but the outer object itself is present to us as an 
actual outer independent reality. When we are aware of an 
object, say a tree, it is the tree itself which we are aware of, not 
our visual, auditory or touch sensations. The New Realism, 
therefore, rejects Subjectivism in all its forms. It denies that 


1 This movement first became generally known in 1912 through the publica- 
tion of a book entitled The New Realism, by Edwin B. Holt, Walter T. Marvin, 
William Pepperrell Montague, Ralph Barton Perry, Walter B. Pitkin, and Ed- 
ward Gleason Spaulding. In England the movement is represented by G. E. 
Moore (see his Philosophical Essays) and 8. Alexander (see his Space, Time, and 
Deity). 


868 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


things are either created or modified by a knowing mind, and 
thus represents the emancipation of philosophy from epistemol- 
ogy, which, indeed, has too long tyrannized over it. Beginning 
as a protest against the domination of Subjectivism, the New 
Realism has developed into a unique and rather vigorous school 
of philosophy opposing both Subjectivism and Absolutism. It 
does not believe that the world is an organic whole or unity of 
such a nature that analysis will destroy its reality, but encour- 
ages the vigorous use of the analytic method known to the 
special sciences and believes that reality is revealed in such 
analysis. Hence the New Realism is intellectualistic, renounc- | 
ing all mystical philosophies and all modern forms of anti- 
intellectualism which rely upon intuition or ineffable insight. - 
It rejects the doctrine that all relations are internal, and holds 
to the externality of relations, such that the nature of the thing 
is not necessarily determined by the relations in which it stands; 
it may get into all kinds of relations with other things without 
changing these other things or being changed by them. It may 
even happen to be known, if some knowing mind comes along, 
and it remains unchanged by this cognitive relation. 

Again, according to the New Realists, relations are not only 
external, but they are objective. Things are not related by the 
mind which grasps them, but the relations in which they stand 
are real, just as real and just as objective as the things them- 
selves. If John is taller than James, not only is John real and 
James real, but the relation expressed by the words taller than 
is also real. Hence a pluralistic world view is favored over mo- 
nistic and dualistic systems. Reality is diverse and rich in its 
manifoldness. We cannot lightly affirm that the Universe is one 
great systematic unity, nor, on the other hand, can we say that 
there is nothing but mind and matter; for there may be many 
other real things — space and time relations, logical principles, 
perhaps even ethical ideals. Thus this rigid analytical Realism 
approaches in the end to a kind of Platonic Realism, in which 
the world of merely physical or mental reality is enlarged by a 
realm of subsistent entities. Even such ideal concepts as justice 
and beauty may, according to some members of this school, find 


Tool tES OF KNOWLEDGE 369 


their place again as real entities! The New Realism is thus’ 
inconsistent with both Materialism and Dualism and with that 
extreme form of Spiritualism which affirms that nothing exists 
except mind.? 


The New Critical Realism 

The powerful realistic tendencies of the present time are seen 
in the rise of another recent school called Critical Realism. We 
may name this the New Critical Realism to distinguish it from 
the older form already mentioned.* The representatives of this 
movement have analyzed the knowing situation with great keen- 
ness and found difficulties not merely with the old idealistic 
theories, but also with the results of the New Realism. Percep- 
tion of objects is not so immediate as the New Realists think. 
Except by inference we cannot go beyond the sense data. If we 
carefully note what is actually given in perception when we see 
a coin lying on the table, or a wheel three feet in diameter rolling 
away from us, we shall at once recognize the fact that the circu- 
larity of the coin or the wheel, is not immediately perceived, nor 
are many others of the features which we attribute to the real 
coin or wheel. Surely the heat of the fire is not directly per- 
ceived, for the heat differs with our distance from the fire. Illu- 
sions and hallucinations of all kinds offer difficulties, too, which 
no naive Realism can solve. 

Nevertheless, the Critical Realist is also a real Realist, for he 
rejects with emphasis the position of the Subjectivist and of the 


1 Not all New Realists would be willing to include ethical and social ideals 
among real entities. Their status is not quite the same as that of logical and 
mathematical forms, yet their reality within the sphere of conduct and society 
might equally well be affirmed. Certainly there would seem to be nothing in- 
consistent with the New Realism in this part of Plato’s philosophy. See the 
discussion of this subject in Spaulding’s The New Rationalism, pp. 344-521. 

2 For a brief statement of the principles of the New Realism, see: 

The New Realism, esp. Introduction, pp. 2—42. 

Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, chap. XIII. 

Rogers, English and American Philosophy Since 1800, chap. vi11. 

S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 11, chap. Iv. 

G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, chaps. I, 1, v. 

3'The doctrines of this school may best be reviewed in a book entitled Essays 
in Critical Realism, also of composite authorship. The several chapters are 
written by Durant Drake, Arthur O. Lovejoy, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur K. 
Rogers, George Santayana, Roy Wood Sellars, and C. A. Strong. 


370 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


absolute Idealist. He accepts the objective existence of things 
because the view is plausible and conforms to common sense and 
works in practice. He accepts this, however, by ‘‘faith,” rather 
than by knowledge, differing in this respect from the New Real- 
ist, who accepts the reality of the physical object because know~’ 
ledge is merely the relation between such an object and the know- 
ing mind. 

The Critical Realist, is, indeed, very much exercised over the 
question, which has perhaps too long lent itself to controversy, 
just what it is that is given in perception. He is no longer con- 
tent, with the Subjectivist, to speak of such things as color and 
sound as sensations belonging only to a mind, nor yet is he will- 
ing to go to the extent of the New Realist and consider them 
as qualities of real objects. He does not believe that the outer 
object is actually and immediately apprehended. The outer ob- 
ject in its bare, brute reality is not given in experience. Only 
the sense data are present in experience, and they are complexes 
which, indeed, reveal the character of the object, but contain 
many other elements; that is, they reflect the nature of the per- 
ceiving mind as well as that of the perceived object.! 

The outer object really exists quite independent of the per-’- 
ceiving mind, but it is something very different from the “datum 
of perception,” the “character-complex apprehended,” which 
has traits not belonging to the outer object. It is the outer 
object as the object appears to the perceiving mind, reflecting, 
indeed, some of the qualities of the real object, the primary qual- 
ities, but containing many secondary qualities, which reflect the 
character of the perceiving organism. The Critical Realist is, 
therefore, disposed to consider the sense data or sensa, as some- 
thing intermediate between the perceiving mind and the physi- 
cally existent thing. So we hear a great deal about the datum, 
or character-complex, or essence. The mind cannot reach out to 
the object itself; it reaches out to the essence, the datum. 

Thus it seems that in the knowing situation there are three 
kinds of entities: first, the perceiving mind or the conscious or- 


1 Compare Durant Drake, ‘‘The Approach to Critical Realism,” in Essays in 
Critical Realism. 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 371 


ganism; second, the outer object, the ultimate brute reality, hav- 
ing only the primary qualities, not immediately apprehended in 
knowledge; third, the datum of perception, that which is immedi- 
ately given to sense, named also the character-complex or essence. 
The latter is not mental, nor any part of the perceiving mind, 
nor is it a part or aspect of the outer object; it is an intermediate 
“logical entity.” 

This particular part of the knowledge problem is, to be sure, 
filled with difficulties, and, no doubt, any final Realism must be 
of the ‘‘critical’’ kind; but I have faith that the difficulties will 
ultimately be solved by a somewhat “‘less critical’? and more 
naive Realism than that of this school; but if so, the researches 
made by the Critical Realists will contribute to the final results. 

Mr. Santayana, in his recent book called Skepticism and 
Animal Faith, has written in his engaging manner much of ‘‘es- 
sences”’; but the plain, blunt man finds difficulty in understand- 
ing what they are. One would fain believe that Santayana 
means that the perceiving organism grasps so much of the physi- 


cally existing thing as is significant to it — its essence for him, _ 


the interested observer. But ‘‘essences”’ have a scholastic fla- 
vor, and one can but wonder whether we need them. If physi- 
cal objects are real, it would seem hardly necessary to regard the 
way they appear, their appearances, as ‘‘logical entities,” float- 
ing between the organism and the object. It would seem quite 
natural that they, the real objects, should call forth different 
reactions under different circumstances. The ‘‘essences’”’ of 
the Critical Realists remind one of the “‘neutral entities” of the 
New Realists — things that perhaps we can get along without. 
It is, of course, true that the heat of the fire is sensed in 
a different way according as the observer is near or far; but 
no mysterious essence, as object of intuition, is here necessary, 
for the real outer object is heat-modified-by-distance. A patch 
of brown leaves may be seen as a bear. But the sensing organ- 
ism does not intuit an ‘‘essence.”’ It intuits a patch of brown 
leaves, and, owing to its own mechanism, its past frights and 
subjective interests, it reacts as it would react to a bear. 
Possibly in some such way as this the problem could be worked 


372 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


out. But we must remember that it is only in later stages of cul- 
ture that sensitive organisms become interested in questions of 
reality in the cognitive sense. For the most part the organism’s 
only interest is in the appropriate reaction to a given stimulus. 
“How,” it asks, “does this experience affect me and my welfare? 
What is its meaning?” But when, in the case of human beings, 
animal curiosity develops into scientific interest, then the observ- 
ing mind begins to inquire about objective ‘‘reality’’; and then 
the observer desires to know what the objective world is really 
like — that is, what it would be as intuited by an observer with 
no subjective interests — and he rebels against being told that 
no approach to the living reality is possible except through 
“faith,” or that he is hopelessly limited in his knowledge to 
phenomena, or to “essences,” or to his own sensations. He feels 
that he has a direct contact with things, or at least with certain 
sides or faces of things, and that sense perception reveals in part 
what things are, not merely what they mean. The realistic’ 
movement of our day would seem to lose much of its zest if we 
are to find in sense perception no direct approach after all to the 
outer existent thing. The latter seems to have receded again to 
a kind of mysterious Kantian Ding an sich, eluding every at- 
tempt to grasp it. Jf the logical position of the Critical Realist 
is better than that of the New Realist, he gains his advantage at 
great sacrifice, finding himself well on the way back to the camp 
of the Idealist. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Ralph Barton Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies (Longmans, Green 
and Company), chap. xu, ‘A Realistic Theory of Knowledge.” 
John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Creative In- 
telligence, pp. 3-69. 


Further references: 
Walter T. Marvin, An Introduction to Philosophy. (The Macmillan 
Company), part 1. 


Douglas Clyde Macintosh, The Problem of Knowledge. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 





1 Compare Bosanquet’s criticism in his Contemporary Philosophy, chap. yu. 


THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE 373 


L. T. Hobhouse, The Theory of Knowledge. (Methuen and Company.) 


Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (Scientific Method 
in Philosophy) (Open Court Publishing Company), chap. m1, “On 
Our Knowledge of the External World.” 


G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (Harcourt, Brace and Company), 
chap. 1, ‘‘The Refutation of Idealism”; also chaps. 0, V, VI, VII. 


Durant Drake and others, Essays in Critical Realism. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 

Edwin B. Holt and others, The New Realism. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 

C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought. (Harcourt, Brace and Company), 


part u, “The Sensational and Perceptual Data of our Scientific Con- 
cepts.” 

R. F. A. Hoernlé, Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics. . (Harcourt, 
Brace and Company), chaps. Iv, v. 

S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity. (The Macmillan Company), vol. 
11, chaps. Iv, V, VI. 

Edward G. Spaulding, The New Rationalism (Henry Holt and Com- 
pany), part 1, section Iv. 

Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 


A. N. Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge. (Cambridge’ 
University Press.) 


CHAPTER XXxI 
PRAGMATISM 


A philosophy of real life 

Pragmatism is a new philosophy, having its rise within the 
twentieth century. It is not so much a new philosophy as a 
new attitude, a new method of approach to philosophical prob- 
lems. The word is from the Greek, having almost the meaning 
of our word active, or efficient. We may thus understand at 
once the spirit of Pragmatism, if we keep in mind that it always 
puts the emphasis upon what is practical, efficient, useful, fruit- 
ful, or satisfying. So it is not strange that it should have origi- 
nated in America, where efficiency is our watchword and where 
the practical and useful are greatly emphasized, rather than the 
theoretical or academic. When Grover Cleveland said, “We 
are confronted by a condition, not a theory,’ he was a Pragma- 
tist. When the man from Missouri demands to be ‘‘shown,”’ he 
is a Pragmatist. 

So when the reader comes to this chapter on Pragmatism, he 
will perhaps say, ‘‘This is the philosophy forme! There is one 
fault I have to find with philosophy, namely, that it is too theo- 
retical, too far removed from our practical concerns, too meta- 
physical and scholastic. What I want is a philosophy of life — 
of real life.”’ 

Well, this is what Pragmatism is. It is distinctly a philosophy 
of life. Life is real and the real is life. It is decidedly a human 
philosophy and has sometimes been called Humanism. When, 
therefore, philosophy becomes the science of human interests 
and the things which are vital to men become the subject of phil- 
osophical study, then, many will say, has come that regeneration 
of philosophy which has long been needed. 

Pragmatism is distinctly a philosophy with a modern outlook. 
The ancient Greeks, with their esthetic contemplative habits, 
with their mathematical and astronomical interests, with their 
curiosity to understand a ready-made perfected world, would 


PRAGMATISM 375 


have cared little for Pragmatism, which is a philosophy of ac- 
tion, doing, experimenting, achieving, overcoming. The Prag- 
matist does not think of the world as ready-made, perfect, beau- 
tiful, something to be enjoyed, contemplated, or worshiped; he 
thinks of it as a world to be made, or made over — remodeled to 
his desires and wishes. Consequently, it is not the astronomical 
‘ Universe, the Cosmos, the world which the physical sciences try 
to penetrate, that the Pragmatist 1s interested in; it is the human 
world, the social world, the industrial world, the world of human 
affairs, which holds his attention. The world is in the making, 
and he wants to know how to make it better, that it may sub- 
serve his interests and his welfare. 


Ideas as instruments 

Consequently, the Pragmatist has a new and original notion 
of the mind, of ideas, of intelligence. He thinks of them as 7n- 
struments for attaining certain ends, or removing difficulties 
and perplexities. So Pragmatism is often called Instrumental- 
asm. ‘The modern man is very much interested in instruments 
or tools. This peculiar interest has been growing ever since 
Archimedes invented the lever, with which he boasted he could 
move the world, if he had a place to stand. Archimedes, to be 
sure, was a Greek, but the Greeks of the classical period would 
not have understood him. They did not wish to move the world; 
they wished to study it, to contemplate and enjoy it. 

But ever since the Industrial Revolution we have been trying 
to move the world, and inventing new tools for moving it, and 
for moving ourselves faster and faster around it. The modern 
man is the instrument-maker, and, taking his cue from this, the 
Pragmatist conceives of Nature as the instrument-maker and 
evolution itself as a process of experimentation, leading to the dis- 
covery of new instruments by which living organisms may attain 
their ends. Intelligence itself is such an instrument or tool, the 
result of Nature’s experiments in evolution. Even philosophy is 
considered no longer as an end in itself, something of intrinsic 
worth and dignity, but as an instrument of social welfare.! 

1Compare Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 124. 


376 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


A difficulty 

Now, all this seems quite exhilarating. It is certainly a new 
and fresh view of philosophy with wonderful practical possibil- 
ities. But our first acclaim may be attended with a little shadow 
of doubt. It is all just a bit confusing, for the reason that we 
had come to look upon philosophy in quite a different way from 
this. We had looked upon it as the search for knowledge and 
truth, as an attempt to understand the world. We had thought 
of it as more like science, a wholly dispassionate and critical in- 
vestigation of things, and their interpretation; and by their inter- 
pretation we had not meant their evaluation for any end, but 
their relation to one another and to the whole. Hence this sud- 
den intrusion of ‘‘interests” and ‘cash values” and ‘‘satisfac- 
tions” and “fruits” is confusing. To be sure, the study of 
human interests, values, and satisfactions is a fascinating theme; 
just as applied science, which is the application of theoretical 
science to practical human problems, is a fascinating study, en- 
grossing the attention of a vast army of seekers after wealth, 
power, comforts, and conveniences. But we had never thought 
of philosophy in this way. 

If there is really any difficulty here, let us overlook it for the 
present and see if we can catch the real spirit of this new move- 
ment. It has certainly become a very famous philosophy, and 
we hear on every hand about James and Dewey and their nu- 
merous disciples. Whether Pragmatism be a true philosophy or 
not, it is certainly a vital one; and to the Pragmatist its vitality 
is evidence of its truth. Whatever we may conclude in the end 
about its value, we must recognize the fact that it has had a very 
wholesome effect upon philosophy in general, purifying it from — 
many wordy subtleties and misty abstractions, and forcing it 
into the narrow path of hard fact and common sense. 


Way of approach 

It would be well for the reader to begin with James’s little 
book entitled Pragmatism. The rapid rise of the whole move- 
ment was largely due to James’s brilliant defense of it. He 


1The credit for the original principle upon which Pragmatism is based is 


PRAGMATISM 377 


spoke directly to real men in real language which they could 
understand. This, they said, is not metaphysics; this is plain 
blunt truth about both pleasant and unpleasant facts. It seems 
like a good democratic philosophy. 

If the successful launching of Pragmatism was due to James’s 
spicy and pungent lectures and essays with his instinct for facts 
and the outcropping of his religious and mystical interests, the 
continued strength of the movement in America is to be at- 
tributed to Dewey’s dialectic skill, connected with his widely 
known interest in educational reform and social welfare. With 
Dewey Pragmatism takes the form of Studies in Logical Theory, 
leading to an instrumental theory of knowledge and of truth, and 
is called Instrumentalism. In England, it has been ably de- 
fended by F. C. §. Schiller, with whom it takes the form of 
Humanism. 

A book bearing the suggestive title Creative Intelligence, pub- 
lished in 1917, and codperatively written by Dewey, Moore, 
Brown, Mead, Bode, Stuart, Tufts, and Kallen, sets forth the 
principles of Pragmatism in their various applications to phi- 
losophy, logic, mathematics, physical science, psychology, ethics, 
economics, art, and religion. 


Pragmatism and religion 

Although the interests of religion have usually been asso- 
ciated with ‘‘tender-minded” Rationalism rather than with 
that “tough-minded”’ Empiricism which is the father of Prag- 
matism, nevertheless, the latter has been found to have close 
affinities with religion and has been somewhat widely accepted 
by religious workers and thinkers. This is because of its em- 
phasis upon the adventurous and strenuous character of life, 
upon the venture of faith and the will to believe, and because of 
its share in the prevailing interest in the psychology of religion. 
Hitherto the theoretical truth of religious beliefs has too much 
engrossed our attention. In practice religion works, and what 
works is in so far forth true, says Pragmatism. Even science, 


usually given to Charles Pierce, who in 1878 wrote an article for the Popular 
Science Monthly, entitled ‘‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.”’ 


378 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


as Schiller points out, makes the venture of faith, setting out 
with strange hypotheses and theories, which await experimental 
verification ‘Our passional need for taking the world reli-. 
giously,” says James, “justifies the venture. It is better to 
yield to the hope that religion may be true than to yield to the 
fear that it may be false, since yield we must to one or the 
other.” ? 

Pragmatism, then, is pluralistic and voluntaristic. It leans 
toward Indeterminism, Nominalism, and Utilitarianism. It is 
evolutionary and naturalistic. It has close affinities with Posi- 
tivism and with Empiricism. It is anti-rationalistic and ener- 
getically anti-intellectualistic, being therefore radically empirical 
and, in James’s picturesque phrase, “‘tough-minded.” Finally, 
it harmonizes easily with the attitude of religion. — 


Pragmatism as a method 

Pragmatism is a tendency and a movement rather than a phi-” 
losophy. In fact it holds philosophical systems in profound sus- 
picion. It is more like a “corridor” through which one may 
enter upon philosophical studies. It is an attitude and a habit 
of thought —a habit of looking forward to results rather than 
backward to first principles. Everything is to be judged by its 
fruits, by its consequences. Thus it follows that any idea, 
theory, or dispute which does not make a difference in its practical 
consequences for us ceases at once to have any significance. All 
these are simply dropped; they cannot be tested. Hence a great 
number of ancient philosophical controversies, theories, hypoth- 
eses, systems just collapse; they fade away under this rigid 
pragmatic test. They do not make any difference. 

A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of, 
inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away 
from abstractions and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad 
a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended 
absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, 


towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the 
empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given 


1See F. C. 8. Schiller, Studies in Humanism, p. 361. 
2 The Will to Believe, especially chap. 1. 


PRAGMATISM 379 


up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against i, 
artificiality, and a pretense of finality in truth. 


Everything moves and changes 

In the older philosophy there was much talk about certain 
ideas, such as God, Matter, Reason, the Absolute, the Soul. 
These ideas were ultimate, and we felt that we could rest in them. 
But the Pragmatist does not take this attitude toward them. He 
does not want to rest. He inquires as to their cash value. He 
will put them to work and see what consequences they may yield. 
If they will not work, they are not true. ‘‘ Pragmatism unstiffens 
all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.” In 
actual life we have always to deal with definite concrete situa- 
tions, and these situations are to be met and solved on their own 
merits — not on abstract traditional principles. Life is a maze 
through which we are threading our way as best we can, finding 
the path as we go along. Answers which solved former situa- 
tions will not solve this one. Everything changes, grows, de- 
velops; nothing is fixed, static, final. 

Even moral laws change; they grow and become perfected. 
There are no fixed or final moral laws and no eternal principles 
either of conduct or knowledge. Reality is in the making; you 
and I are making it. The road to the future is an open road, 
obstructed by no overruling providence or limiting fates, and 
determined by no a priort principles of thought. Reality is 
found in the flow of experience. The world is moving toward no 
predetermined end; each hill is surmounted as it comes into view. 
What happens next is not determined, but is contingent upon 
what has happened. Life is a series of problems to be solved — 
a succession of real struggles with real difficulties. To think is to 
deal effectively with these problems — and ideas are tools to 
help in the solution. 

Reality is fluid, changing, evolving. Pictures of a God-made, 
perfect world, governed by eternal principles of justice or by 
eternal mathematical laws, are just fancies. Leibniz’ theory of 
the world as the best of all possible worlds is false. The only 


1 William James, Pragmatism (Longmans, Green and Company), p. 51. 


$80 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


real world is the world of real experience. James mentions the 
case of a man with a wife and six children to support. ‘The man 
was out of work and tramped for days through the snow search- 
ing for work in vain and then returned to find his family starving 
and a notice of dispossession on the door. He committed suicide 
by drinking carbolic acid. This is a piece of reality, but it does 
not mean that reality is bad. Reality is just experience, and 
this is a part of experience. 

The spirit of Pragmatism is the spirit of youth, adventure, and 
experimentation; it has no patience with idle vaporings about 
fate and destiny. No philosophical ideas are true which cannot 
be put to some practical use. Take such words as God, free-will, 
or design. Other than practical significance, says James, they 
have none. ‘Yet dark though they be in themselves, or intel- 
lectualistically taken, when we bear them into life’s thicket with 
us, the darkness there grows light about us. If you stop in deal- 
ing with such words with their definitions, thinking that to be an 
intellectual finality, where are you? Stupidly staring at a pre- 
tentious sham. Pragmatism alone can give a rich meaning to 
them. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” 

Pragmatism is thus the forward-looking philosophy of hope 
and promise. Take, for instance, says James again, that ancient 
controversy between Materialism and Idealism. In themselves 
the two rival theories have no significance. Suppose the world 
to be now ending, having no future. What possible difference 
would it then make whether it is the product of blind mechanical 
energies or of living divine spirit? None whatever; the old con- 
troversy is dead. But now, with the Pragmatist, suppose the 
world to have an undetermined future. ‘Then, indeed, it will 
make a difference whether we are Materialists or Idealists. For 
according to Materialism the blind forces which have built up 
the world will certainly destroy it. We must look forward some- 
time to a dead world, from which all hope is gone, and in which 
all ideals have perished. But if Idealism is true, if there is a God 
in the heaven, somehow the good will survive; we are assured of 
an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. 

Or take again the free-will controversy, that old and useless 


PRAGMATISM 381 


puzzle that admits of no solution. For the Pragmatist who be- 
lieves that the world is in the making and nothing ordained, all 
at once is changed. For the future it will make a lot of difference 
whether we believe in free-will or determinism. Freedom now 
becomes true because of its successful leading. “ Free-will prag- 
matically means novelties in the world, the right to expect that in 
its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the 
future may not identically repeat and imitate the past.’ } 


Thus far Pragmatism seems tremendously stimulating. It 
gives to philosophy a life and movement which other systems 
lack. It is refreshing when philosophy is brought down to 
earth in this way and put to work. It is comforting to learn that 
all our experiences are integral parts of reality. But all this is 
only a manner of approach to philosophy, just a method. We 
are impatient to learn what the Pragmatist actually believes 
about the things usually studied in philosophy, about reality, 
about God, the soul, purpose, causality, knowledge, evolution, 
conduct. 

I am afraid we shall be somewhat disappointed in the answers 
which the Pragmatist gives to these questions. His very pur- 
pose is to shift the interest away from some of these problems to 
those of practical importance. We must keep in mind that 
Pragmatism is a doctrine of logical method — not a theory of the 
Universe; and the Pragmatists, so far as they have ventured out 
into the field of metaphysics, have usually done so in order 
merely that they might find examples to illustrate their method. 
In demanding of them a philosophy of the world in general, we 
are asking more than they have promised to give. It seems, 
however, at least at first sight, that in their theory of radical 
empiricism they have ventured into metaphysics, trying to tell 
us what reality is. This we must now notice. 


Radical empiricism 
The view that philosophy is limited to actual experience brings 
us to one of the cardinal doctrines of Pragmatism, taking the 
1 William James, op. cit., pp. 118, 119. 


382 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


form of radical empiricism with James and immediate empiricism 
with Dewey. If philosophy is to divest itself of all the excres- 
cences that have accumulated through the ages, if it 1s to be con-~ 
crete, vital, and real, it must start with something actual; and 
immediate experience is the only actual reality. Matter and 
spirit, body and soul, subject and object, a prior: rules of thought 
or conduct — all these are too far away, too abstract, too unreal. 
Philosophy cannot begin with them — can perhaps have nothing 
to do with them. It has to do only with experience; the world is 
a world of pure experience. 


To-be and to-be-experienced come to the same thing. Things are 
what they are experienced as. Everything that we experience is equally 
real. Even illusions are real; they are ideal, as contrasted with actual 
realities. In this “immediate empiricism,” as Professor Dewey calls it, 
our philosophy is fundamentally grounded. Reality 71s experience. — 
These two words describe the same whole from different points of view. 
‘Reality’? emphasizes the content of experience. ‘“‘Experience’’ em- 
phasizes the process of reality. The one states What experience is, the 
other How it proceeds. Physical science has dealt so exclusively with 
the What, the content, that it has come to treat the facts of the universe 
as if they existed independently of the process. Psychological science 
has treated mental process in abstraction from its physical conditions 
and results, until it has come to assume the existence of a separate world 
of mind or consciousness distinct from its content. The truth is that 
there is but one reality: the content of experience. There is but one 
experience: the process of the evolution of that content. We know 
nothing of what “things” are in themselves, apart from a possible ex- 
perience. There are no “thoughts” in the abstract. Things are the 
contents of thoughts, while thoughts merely represent the internal meta- 
morphoses of things.1 


Now here the trouble begins. Up to this point all has been 
plain sailing. Pragmatism as a method seems wholesome and 
sane. But to say that reality and experience are identical seems 
to plunge us into the very metaphysics from which we were sup- 
posed to be rescued. How can any sane man, perhaps the reader 
will ask, affirm that all reality is experience? That all experi- 
ences are real is one thing and very true; but that all realities are 


1H. Heath Bawden, The Principles of Pragmatism (Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany), pp. 55-56. 


PRAGMATISM | 383. 


experiences is quite another thing and apparently not true. Do 
the Pragmatists mean that all reality is somebody’s experience? 
If so, we seem to be thrown back into the subjective Idealism 
from which we supposed that all virile modern philosophies had 
escaped. If, on the other hand, they mean that all reality is just 
experience In general, we seem to need to have the word defined. 
What does the word experience mean in its simple and obvious 
sense? Why, surely, it means that something happens to some- 
body and somebody does something. It is a term that has no 
application outside the circle of sentient beings. It is confined 
to the biological world, meaning that an organism, an animal, 
or a man feels something and does something. We do not say 
that a stone rolling down the mountain and colliding with a tree 
has had an experience. Philosophy, of course, is very much inter- 
ested in the biological world, especially in man, his origin, des- 
tiny, and knowledge. But its interests are not limited to man 
or to animals; it is interested in the physical environment, in 
space and time, in God and the primeval energy, in stars and 
star clusters, in the causal relation and in relations of all kinds. 
And, furthermore, even if we confine our study to man and his 
experiences, to the things he does and suffers and the way he 
attains his ends, we certainly wish to know what man himself 7s, 
and how he came to have any wishes or ends or experiences. 
What do the Pragmatists mean by saying that everything is ez- 
perience, and that everything 7s what it is experienced as? Why 
have they involved us in this metaphysical tangle? 

Unfortunately, I am afraid that we shall not get a very satis- 
factory answer to these questions from the writings of the Prag- 
matists. Although the charge of subjective Idealism has re- 
peatedly been laid at their door, and although numerous pas- 
sages in their writings seem to admit of no other interpretation, 
nevertheless, they repudiate vigorously any subjectivism of the 
Berkeleian type, and constantly speak in a very realistic and 
common-sense way of the reality of the world beyond human 
experience.! 


1There has been a long and not very profitable discussion in philosophical 
journals as to whether Pragmatism is idealistic and subjectivistic, the outconie 


384 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Dr. Bawden, for instance, treats the whole subject very natu- 
ralistically, speaking of cosmic energies and their redistribution, 
and the evolution of organisms, but the significance and reality 
of everything is after all determined by the conditions of know- 
ledge. Every act of knowing changes the thing known, because 
the thing enters thereby into new and significant relations. All 
things are interconnected. The dynamic functional view must 
prevail everywhere. ‘‘ Experience is primarily activity, process 
—something going on.”’ Dewey again quite naturalistically 
takes for granted a real organism with its real inherent desires 
and makes it his task to show the significance of ideas, intelli- 
gence, and knowledge in the evolution of the life of the organism. 

As for James, I think he did not mean that all reality is experi- 
ence, but that “the only things that shall be debatable among 
philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from ex- 
perience.”” He was concerned with the problem of analyzing ex- 
perience to show that it does not imply any a priori categories, 
or substantial soul, or consciousness as an entity. He was des- 
perately anxious to escape from all the old puzzles of subject and 
object, and the old dualism of mind and body. All these oppo- 
sitions are not to be solved by calling in any higher unifying 
agent from some spiritual realm or some sphere of pure reason. 
The difficulties disappear if we regard these various oppositions 
as just different kinds of actual relationships, which really exist 
between the terms of experience. From this radically empirical 
standpoint even the old opposition between the mental and the 
physical disappears, for it depends upon the context into which 
the neutral stuff of pure experience gets, whether we call it men- 
tal or physical. 

On the whole, it seems unfortunate that the Pragmatists should 
have insisted that all reality is experience. It has led to much 
misunderstanding. Their problem is psychological and episte- 
mological rather than metaphysical. They want to show by the 
of which seems to be that there is nothing in essential Pragmatism inconsistent 
with a realistic view of the world. A clear summary of the reasons may be 
found in four articles by W. P. Montague in volume vi of the Journal of Philo- 


sophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, but Montague does not think that the 
Pragmatic theory of truth is consistent with Realism. 


PRAGMATISM 385 


analysis of pure experience what knowledge does and does not 
imply. But you and I may be interested in fields of reality 
quite outside these provinces and may be wholly unwilling to 
admit that all reality is experience in any sense of the term. 


Instrumentalism 

A further glance at that kind of Pragmatism called Instru- 
mentalism will help us to understand why there is so much em- 
phasis upon experience. The Instrumentalist is a biologist and 
an evolutionist. He is interested in showing how knowledge has 
arisen in the evolutionary movement, and in pointing out the 
function of intelligence. He therefore assumes outright the pre- 
sence of the organism with its vital interests — its will-to-live, as 
you or I might say —and he assumes the presence of a real en- 
vironment consisting of natural energies. Experience, then, is 
the intercourse of the living organism with its physical and social 
environment.! The questions why organisms exist, what they 
are made of, why they come to be organisms, why they strive 
and wish to live and propagate their kind, seem to many students 
of philosophy exceedingly interesting problems belonging pro- 
perly to their field; and hence, since the Pragmatists in their 
theory of knowledge put so much stress on biological needs, 
one is apt to feel impatient with them for not grounding these 
biological needs more deeply. 

The Instrumentalist, then, taking for granted the organism 
and its needs, goes on to show by the analysis of experience how 
such things as thought, reflection, intelligence, ideas, and con- 
cepts may be explained. He shows that the environmental 
energies are sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile to the 
good of the individual. The latter, therefore, is confronted with 
the task of controlling and moulding the environment to his own 
welfare; he must achieve the good and avert the evil. In such 
an enterprise, memory, imagination, reflection, and thought will 
be of priceless advantage in the struggle for existence, and by 
Darwinian laws will be encouraged and preserved. Thought is 
not a process of reduplication or copying of a determinate objec- 

1See Creative Intelligence, p. 7 ff. 


386 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


tive world, but a process of experimenting with it, changing it, 
moulding it to suit one’s vital demands. 

We are not to think of experience as the expression of any psy- 
chical entity or subject, such as a soul or spirit or consciousness. 
It is rather the interaction of organism with environment. Ideas 
are not psychical entities or subjective representations of an 
objective reality; they are plans of action, taking into account 
future consequences with reference to the weal or woe of the 
organism. By intelligence is meant just this ability to organize 
responses with constant reference to future consequences. 

The process of intelligence is something that goes on, not in our 
minds, but in things; it is not photographic, but creative. From the 
simplest perception to the most ideal aspiration or the wildest halluci- 
nation, our human experience is reality engaged in the guidance or con- 
trol of behavior. Things undergo a change in becoming experienced, but 
the change consists in a doing, in the assumption of a certain task or 
duty. The experiential object hence varies with the response; the situ- 
ation and the motor activity fit together like the sections of a broken 
bowl. 

The bearing of this standpoint on the interpretation of psychology is 
readily apparent. If it be granted that consciousness is just a name for 
behavior that is guided by the results of acts not yet performed but 
reflected beforehand in the objects of experience, it follows that this 
behavior is the peculiar subject-matter of psychology.? 


Purpose and Conflict ) 
Two things stand out prominently in the pragmatic psychol- 
ogy; first, the purposive character of thought, and, second, the 
importance of conflict. All thinking is purposive. Pragmatism 
itself is defined by Schiller as “the thorough recognition that 
the purposive character of mental life generally must influence 
and pervade also our most remotely cognitive activities.” Prag- 
matism is thus thoroughly teleological, not in the wider sense of 
a cosmic purposiveness, but in the sphere of mental life. It is 

what we may call a teleological voluntarism.? 
The notion of conflict is equally important. Our whole con- 


1 Bode, “Consciousness and Psychology,” in Creative Intelligence (Henry Holt 
and Company), p. 255. 
2 Compare I’. C. 8. Schiller, Humanism, p. 8. 


PRAGMATISM 387 


scious life arises in conflict, where a difficult situation has to be 
surmounted, where a problem of readjustment has to be solved. 
We may conceive that consciousness itself arose when some ani- 
mal awoke to the discovery that the old habitual responses were 
not adequate to the new difficult situation. A sudden interrup- 
tion of the even flow of vital functions made it necessary for the 
animal for the first time in his life, or the life of his kind, to do 
some thinking, to awake to consciousness — to sit up and take 
notice. So Pragmatism reverses the old belief that first comes 
the soul, and then the soul thinks. Quite the contrary, the soul 
is born in thought and thought is born in struggle and in tension. 
But the significant and joyful fact remains that the difficulty zs 
overcome, the problem zs solved. Pragmatism is thus the for- 
ward-looking philosophy of promise and fulfillment. 

Hence it comes about that intelligence is creative. It is con- 
stantly moulding and making reality. But this creative force is 
always a process of experimentation. It is different from the 
creative work of the artist, who is striving to approach to some 
_pattern or ideal. 


What is truth? 

We have left till the last the mention of one of the most dis- 
tinctive of the pragmatic doctrines, the theory of truth. It is 
this which made Pragmatism famous— some would say, in- 
famous. I should regard it as the least important of the contri- 
butions which have come from thismovement. It is the striking 
and paradoxical character of the theory which has brought it into 
such prominence. 

In order to understand this doctrine of truth, 1t would be a 
good plan for the reader to lay down this book and ask him- 
self the question, What zs truth? What does the word truth 
mean? What do we mean by saying that a proposition is true 
or false? The statement that the shores of New England are 
bathed by the waters of the Pacific Ocean is said to be false. 
Why? That they are bathed by the waters of the Atlantic is 
true. Why? 


388 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


The correspondence theory 

I suppose the answer would be something like this: Truth is 
that which conforms to fact, which agrees with reality, which 
corresponds to the actual situation. ‘This is called the corre- 
spondence theory of truth. It is the view of the so-called plain 
man, who distinguishes the fact from the statement of the fact, 
and when the statement corresponds with the fact, then it is 
true. The reason, then, that the statement is true that the 
shores of New England are bathed by the waters of the Atlantic, 
is that this statement corresponds with the facts. Before any 
one ever made this judgment, the waters of the Atlantic did 
actually bathe the shores of New England. 

Now, all sorts of objections may be made to this definition of 
truth. The difficulties in defining truth were known long before 
Pragmatism exploited them. It is said, for instance, that it is 
impossible to compare a judgment or statement with external 
reality. You can lay your yardstick alongside a board and 
observe whether they correspond, but you cannot lay a judg- 
ment beside a fact to see if they correspond. Does it mean any- 
thing to say that a judgment “corresponds to” a fact, or that it 
“copies” external reality? 

Furthermore, it is complained, it is mere tautology to say that 
a judgment, such as the rose is red, corresponds to the fact, for 
facts themselves are merely cases of knowledge. The fact and 
the truth are the same thing, so that it is useless to say that truth 
is correspondence to fact. 

Now, in recent years, as a result of the pragmatic theory, a 
whole new literature has sprung up relating to the meaning of 
the word truth, a discussion altogether too technical to be of 
interest to us in this brief chapter. It will be possible here only 
to state the other theories of truth, particularly the pragmatic 
theory, intimating to the wise reader that a whole course of study 
would be necessary before he could decide between the rival 
views. Meanwhile, if one wishes to éell the truth, there is not 
much difficulty in knowing what it is. 

Concerning the correspondence theory of truth, however, it 
may do no harm to say that, in spite of its difficulties, it is prob- 


PRAGMATISM 389 


ably more widely held by philosophers and scientists who have 
given thought to the subject than any other theory. Possibly the 
word fidelity may be preferable to the word correspondence. Truth, 
then, would be defined as fidelity to objective reality, and I do 
not see that any serious difficulties need arise with this definition. 

Let us make the postulate, harmless as such, that there are 
real independent things, such as oceans and shores, suns and 
planets, roses and qualities of roses. Let us suppose that these 
things with their relations and their qualities really existed be- 
fore there were any sentient beings to observe them, or reasoning 
men or quarreling philosophers to make judgments about them. 
Then suppose such reasoning beings should come and observe 
these things and invent language to designate them and their 
relations and qualities, and should then say, for instance, that the 
sun is larger than the earth. Such a judgment would be a faith- 
ful one, and such fidelity might be called truth. It should be 
observed also of the fidelity theory of truth that this or some- 
thing like this is what the word truth means in common usage; so 
that if any one uses the word truth in a wholly different sense, this | 
fact should be made perfectly clear. 


The coherence theory of truth 

Owing to the difficulties in the correspondence theory, another 
view has been propounded to the effect that truth is consistency. 
What do we mean when we say that a theorem in geometry is 
true? Here we do not mean primarily that it corresponds to 
objective reality, but that it fits perfectly into a certain system 
of other theorems, propositions, axioms, and definitions. There 
is perfect coherence, and this coherence with other certain and 
accepted things is called truth. 

Undoubtedly the word truth is used in this narrower sense. 
If we start with premises that are true in some other sense of the 
word truth, and if our conclusions are logically drawn, we call 
our conclusions true. In geometry we start with a few axioms 
and definitions, and proceeding logically, the whole system will 
be true, or as true as the initial assumptions. But this is evi- 
dently not what we mean by truth in common usage as it is ap- 


390 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


plied to judgments of matters of fact. Indeed, it would seem to 
be possible to have a whole consistent system of falsehoods. For 
instance, Johnny’s mother tells him not to go in swimming; but 
he goes and then tells her that he did not go, and then, buttress- 
ing his statement with that of his pals, builds up a chain of 
evidence to support his lie that makes it seem to his mother to 
be a coherent and consistent system, his own statement fitting 
in perfectly with all the other elements in the situation. All the 
parts of this system are coherent, and yet we could not say that 
the various statements are true. If we say that the several parts 
are not coherent with the original act, then we are going back to 
the correspondence theory. Certainly, however, consistency is 
an element in some kinds of truth. A group of propositions is 
not up to the ideal of truth, if the propositions are not internally 
consistent. The consistency theory and the correspondence 
theory supplement rather than contradict each other. Perhaps 
the simplest and best view is just this, that truth is fidelity to 
reality; but since in innumerable cases we cannot compare our 
ideas and judgments with reality, the best we can do is to see 
if they are consistent with other ideas and judgments which we 
have accepted as true. 


The pragmatic theory of truth 

According to the Pragmatist, who starts with the mere flux of 
experience and finds reality in this flux, the two older theories 
of truth seem to have no application. Possibly, also, the Prag- 
matist, in working out his new theory of truth, has been influ- 
enced by the Idealist’s belief in something called absolute truth, 
the notion that there is somewhere laid up a body of truth that 
is sacred and unchanging. Now, the Pragmatist is not friendly 
to the notion of the absolute in any form. At this point it does 
not occur to him to drop the word truth, since his system has no 
place for it in any sense in which it has commonly been used; but 
he proposes to redefine truth, giving it quite a new and unex- 
pected meaning.! 


1 James, harassed by his critics, did finally propose to leave the adjective true 
for the older notion and adopt the word truthful for the pragmatic one. (See 
The Meaning of Truth, p. 225.) 


PRAGMATISM 391 


To make clear the pragmatic theory of truth, let us begin by 
inquiring, first, not about the nature of truth, but about its crite- 
rion. This is not the question of what truth is, but how we are 
to know it, how it is to be tested. The world is full of theories, 
hypotheses, general opinions, and guesses, where direct verifica- 
tion by an appeal to observed facts is not possible. Various cri- 
teria of truth have been proposed in ancient and modern times, 
such as “irresistible conviction,” ‘‘inconceivability of the oppo- 
site,’ “presenting itself to the mind with such clearness and dis- 
tinctness that it cannot be doubted.” Now, the Pragmatist 
proposes another criterion, and a very practical one, to the effect 
that any theory or hypothesis or idea is true, if 7é leads to satis- 
factory consequences, if it works out in practice, if it has practical 
value. Truth is revealed by its usefulness, by its fruits, by its 
practical consequences. Value becomes the measure of truth. 
Truth works in the long run, and if any idea or theory works, we 
may suppose it to be true. Satisfactory working, fulfillment of 
function, successful leading, are the marks of truth. 

Now there seems to be nothing very revolutionary or strange 
about this. Itis reasonable to suppose that truth in the long run 
will lead to good and satisfactory results; and usefulness, while 
it may not be the sole criterion of truth, or an infallible one, still 
is a good practical test. 

But, unfortunately, the Pragmatist does not stop with this 
wholesome doctrine. He goes on to say that workableness is not 
merely the éest of truth, it is the nature of truth. You and I, per- 
haps, took it for granted that the nature of truth was its agree- 
ment with reality and anything which agrees with reality will 
probably lead to satisfactory results in practice; so that, if it 
leads to such results, it is probably true. But the Pragmatist — 
that is, the extreme Pragmatist — says that the usefulness of 
truth is all there is to it. Truth zs that which works. ‘True 
ideas,”’ says James, “‘are those that we can assimilate, validate, 
corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.” 
“The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. 
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by 
events. Its verity zs in fact an event, a process; the process 


392 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is 
the process of its valid-ation.” ! Hence it follows that ideas and 
judgments are not true until they are verified, and their verifica- 
tion consists in their leading to satisfactory consequences. If 
the statement is made that there is another planet within the 
orbit of Mercury, the statement is neither true nor false, but 
becomes so in the process of verification or non-verification. 

This theory, propounded by the Pragmatist, that truth is what 
works well in practice, that it is a kind of expediency, met with 
a storm of criticism and disapproval. It was only the eminent 
character of its proponents that gave it a wide hearing. Hitherto 
truth had been regarded as something cherished and, in a way, 
sacred, as something definite and stable, at least as stable as the 
things about which the truth was asserted. The statement that 
there is another planet within the orbit of Mercury was, it was 
supposed, either true or false when it was made, depending upon 
the actual constitution of the solar system. Hence the prag- 
matic notion of truth as something that happens to a judgment 
in the course of its verification came as a kind of shock to stu- 
dents of philosophy. This extreme form of the theory has been 
difficult to defend, and it has been modified in many ways by 
later writers of the school.? It seems possible to maintain it only 
on the basis of a subjectivist philosophy. When it is still main- 
tained, it is evident that the word truth is used in a sense different 
from its generally accepted meaning. 

Pragmatists are very fond of speaking of the truth of ideas, 
rather than of judgments, and, since ideas in pragmatic philos- 
ophy are merely “plans of action,” just what do they mean 
when they say that they are true? A plan of action might be a 
good plan or a bad plan, but we should hardly speak of it as 
true or false. If a town were threatened by a flood and some 
one proposed a plan of action, his fellow townsmen would not 


1 William James, Pragmatism, p. 201. 

2A useful summary and criticism of the pragmatic theory of truth may be 
found in D. C. Macintosh’s The Problem of Knowledge, pp. 401-37. No one in- 
terested in this discussion should fail to read the book, What Is Pragmatism? 
by James Bissett Pratt, especially lectures m and ut. Compare also the keen 
criticism of James’s theory of truth by G. E. Moore in his book, Philosophical 
Studies, chap. 111. 


PRAGMATISM 393 


ask whether the plan was a true one, but whether it was a Ue 
one or a feasible one. 

So it all seems to come to this: If the Pragmatists mean that 
satisfactory working is a test or criterion of truth, the view is as 
wholesome as it is old and innocent.! If they mean that ideas or 
judgments as plans of action are true because of leading to satis- 
factory consequences — that is, find their truth in the satisfac- 
tory consequences — they are using the word true where other 
people would use the word good; and a lot of trouble and mis- 
understanding would have been avoided if the Pragmatist had 
used the word good or invented some other word expressing value. 
The test of truth is one thing; the structure or nature of truth is 
quite another. 

The whole controversy is coming now to have only an histor- 
ical significance, since later pragmatic writers seem to recognize, 
though perhaps guardedly, the validity of the correspondence 
theory, at least within limits.2 What the Pragmatists were 
alarmed at was the absolutist doctrine of a body of unchanging 
truth laid up, so to speak, in the heavens. Possibly now Prag- 
matists and others could agree that individual perceptions and 
judgments are true when they are adapted to the facts of the 
environment,’ emphasizing as Schiller does that the reality which 


1 Of course, satisfactory working is not even an infallible test. Take again the 
case of Johnny and his mother. Johnny goes in swimming and derives great 
satisfaction from the adventure. On returning home Johnny’s mother asks him 
if he has been in swimming, and he says “‘ No,” and offers a wholly plausible and 
satisfactory explanation of his absence. Johnny’s mother unreservedly accepts 
this explanation and gets great satisfaction from the supposed veracity of her 
offspring. Johnny’s companions in the adventure, who know the whole situa- 
tion, derive much satisfaction from it all. Johnny’s bath resulted in very saiis- 
factory hygienic conditions, and on Saturday night Johnny’s mother, after an 
examination of Johnny’s arms and legs, derives an increased satisfaction from 
Johnny’s increasingly cleanly habits. Hence, if truth is that which leads to 
satisfactory results, Johnny’s statement that he did not go in swimming must 
have been true. And if, to escape this difficulty, the Pragmatist adds that the 
statement is true ‘‘in so far forth,’”’ then the whole thing reduces to the truistic 
result that satisfactory working is a help in the discovery of truth. 

An illustration of this kind is of course a parody on the pragmatic doctrine 
of truth and is only justified in silencing those who have attempted to make 
emotional satisfaction rather than logical satisfaction the test of truth. Logical sat- 
isfactoriness can hardly be distinguished from consistency as a criterion of truth. 

2Compare Murray’s Pragmatism, pp. 45, 46. 

3 Compare the clear article by Montague in Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Sci. 
Meth., vol. vi, pp. 233-38. 


394 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


philosophy seeks is a selected reality. God, matter, purpose, and 
such concepts are the selected portions of reality which philos- 
ophy considers best worth knowing.! 


The permanent contributions of Pragmatism 

It is a little difficult as yet to estimate the actual contributions 
to philosophy of this new movement. It has certainly done good 
service in again calling philosophy down from the heavens to the 
hearths and homes of men. Philosophy hitherto had been very 
much an avocation of a few select “highbrows,’”’ who frequented 
college and university classrooms, distant from the practical 
interests of common men. The recent widespread revival of 
interest in philosophy has been partly due to the work of the 
Pragmatists. People who shivered at the very name of philos- 
ophy, confusing it with the Hegelian dialectic or the Roycean 
Absolute, now began to study Pragmatism, and entering through 
this gate, found philosophy interesting and helpful. If we are 
shocked at the extravagances and paradoxes of the Pragmatists, 
it is well to remember that nothing but a jolt like this would have 
brought philosophy down to earth. 

Particularly was the theory of knowledge a dark and forbid- 
ding field for any but the elect. The very word epistemology 
suggested something quite awful. Dewey, by showing that all 
those different and difficult things like concepts, ideas, syllogisms, 
thought, and imagination, are merely practical instruments for 
solving the problems and perplexities of life, and are quite natu- 
rally evolved as new powers which animal organisms develop 
when new conditions arise, has brought the whole subject within 
the comprehension of practical-minded men. The genetic treat- 
ment of knowledge has thrown a lot of light upon this difficult 
chapter in philosophy. Much of the mystery has been removed 
from a long list of psychological terms, such as thought, intellect, 
reflection, imagination, mind, and consciousness, fitting them 
into the general evolutionary scheme. Pragmatism has become 
a live branch of philosophy because it emphasizes the things 
which everybody is interested in now — evolution, growth, will, 


1Compare F, C. 8. Schiller, Humanism, chap. m1, 


PRAGMATISM 395 


purpose, initiative, practical results, human hopes and desires, 
human progress. It was fully time for a reaction against the 
excessive intellectualism of preceding systems, and Pragmatism 
represents this reaction in its extreme form. 

Another fine thing which the Pragmatists have done is to call 
our attention to the creative power of the human mind, or crea- 
tive intelligence. It has been a revelation to many that a phil- 
osophical system which is at once strongly evolutionary and 
naturalistic may still speak of the creative mind, of new ethical 
and social ideals, of indefinite moral and social progress. People 
had thought of naturalism and evolution as associated with 
materialism, determinism, and fatalism, as though man were 
helpless in the face of mechanical forces, as though he were a 
puppet awaiting his fate at the hands of the physical forces of the 
Universe. Pragmatism teaches that the world is in the making 
and you and I are making it, and that there is no limit to our 
effective agency. Even moral laws change and may be much 
Improved. 

What has been called Essential Pragmatism seems to me to be 

a genuine philosophy of life. In its early enthusiasms, however, 
it was beguiled into extreme positions,! and so plunged us into 
a lot of hair-splitting dialectic which would put the old School- 
men to shame. As examples of such positions may be men- 
tioned, first, the extreme pragmatic doctrine of truth, with the 
unhappy dialectical entanglements which followed; and, second, 
the identification of experience with reality. There must be 
something wrong with Pragmatism when it has to labor so hard 
against the imputation of solipsism. Some Pragmatists must 
have lapsed into a terminology altogether too subjectivistic. 


But something is lacking 

What seems to be lacking in Pragmatism is a high idealism. 
There is too great an emphasis upon the striving and not enough 
upon the goal. The pragmatic world view seems confined to 
that particular part of reality which begins with the organism 


1 James, himself, to whom Pragmatism owes almost its very life, was one of 
the worst offenders in this respect. 


396 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


already in possession of certain unexplained interests and desires, 
and is concerned only with the means of satisfying these desires. 
Thought becomes a mere tool for satisfying our vital demands. 
without a sufficient examination of the demands themselves. 
The Pragmatists have frequently resented, and perhaps with 
much justice, the imputation that they hold a narrow utilitarian 
view of life; and Dewey speaks of the “intrinsic, zesthetic, and 
immediate value of thought and of science,” and of the joy and 
dignity of life which intelligence adds.1_ But intelligence is never 
really considered as a goal, but only as a guide. What it is a 
guide to, no Pragmatist seems to know. We are exhorted to 
have faith in intelligence as the savior of men; but what we are 
to be saved from, or what we are to be saved for, is not made 
clear. 

Is the empiricism of Pragmatism, after all, deep enough? Do 
not men instinctively strive toward a goal rather than search 
for some instrument for increasing their satisfactions? Prag- 
matism boasts of being fundamentally teleological, of always 
turning toward the future, and yet the end is never clearly 
defined. ; 

The Pragmatists in reacting from the old intellectualism, 
which looked upon the intellect as an oracle, have come to regard 
it as a mere tool or contrivance, in which the will is nothing but 
a will-to-live, not actuated by any lofty purpose nor pursuing 
any sublime ideal, but tinkering with its environment in order to 
find some way through, endlessly trying experiments to see if 
some satisfaction might happen, and always retreating if vital 
needs are not enhanced. This may all be true, but 7# certainly 1s 
not the way it feels to be a man, and it certainly is not the notion 
of the human spirit that has been handed down to us by our 
fathers — even in this utilitarian America. Dewey, to be sure, 
speaks about social welfare as the end and aim of philosophy, but 
vaguely and obscurely as it seems to me. One gets the impres- 
sion that it is just the satisfaction of biological needs which con- 


1 See his article on the ‘“‘ Development of American Pragmatism, ” in the Revue 
de Métaphysique et de Morale, October, 1922. Manuscript translation by Herbert 
W. Schneider. 


PRAGMATISM 397 


stitutes social welfare. And, indeed, it does not seem to me that 
philosophy exists for the sake of social welfare. Philosophy and 
science, religion and art, are themselves ends to be attained in 
any perfect society. 

There is certainly some justification for Windelband’s severe 
criticism of Pragmatism, when he says that it is “a grotesque 
confusion of means and ends.” “It represents a victory of noetic 
individualism which, in the decay of our intellectual culture, 
would release the elementary force of the will and let it pour 
itself over the realm of pure thought. It calls into question one 
of the greatest achievements of civilization, the purity of the will 
to truth.” 4 

The great things of the world have been done by men who were 
inspired by great ideals, ideals of justice, righteousness, beauty, 
and truth. These lofty ideals are not something to be made 
and then tested by their satisfactoriness; they are something to 
be attained. Beauty which exists just to be appreciated, truth 
which exists just to be contemplated, laws of nature which just 
have to be discovered and wondered at, ideals which just have to 
be aspired to — all these great things wculd seem to have no 
place in pragmatic philosophy, which is too subjective. Some- 
thing eternal must draw us on. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
William James, Pragmatism. (Longmans, Green and Company.) 


Arthur Kenyon Rogers, English and American Philosophy Since 1800 
(The Macmillan Company), chap. vu, ‘‘ Pragmatism.” 


Further references: 
James Bissett Pratt, What Is Pragmatism? (The Macmillan Company.) 


A. W. Moore, Pragmatism and Its Critics. (The University of Chicago 
Press.) 

John Dewey and others, Creative Intelligence. (Henry Holt and Com- 
pany.) 

F. C. 8. Schiller, Studies in Humanism. (The Macmillan Company.) 

David Leslie Murray, Pragmatism. (Constable and Company.) 


1 Wilhelm Windelband, An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Joseph 
McCabe (T. Fisher Unwin), p. 175, 


398 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Edward G. Spaulding, The New Rationalism. (Henry Holt and Com- 
pany), chap. XXXII. 

A. O. Lovejoy, ‘‘The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” Jour. of Phil., Psych., and 
Sci. Meth., vol. v, p. 5. 

John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (Henry Holt and 
Company), Hssays in Experimental Logic (The University of Chicago 
Press), Human Nature and Conduct (Henry Holt and Company). 

Josiah Royce, “‘The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discus- 
sion,” in William James and Other Essays. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.): 
lecture x11, ‘Truth and Falsehood.” 


CHAPTER XXII 
THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 


MoraAL VALUES 


Wuat is the Highest Good? What is Most Worth While? . 
What is Right and what is Wrong, and why is Right right and 
Wrong wrong? What are the grounds of Moral Judgment? 
These are old questions which men have asked ever since philo- 
sophizing began. They introduce us to the problem of conduct, 
the subject of the science of ethics, the most important of all the 
sciences. 


A practical science 
A moment’s reflection will show that this is a different kind of 
problem from those we have been studying. Hitherto we have 
been wondering about reality, about the constitution of the 
world and of the mind. We have been prying into the nature of 
_things, into the texture of reality. Now, when we take up the 
Theory of Morals, we seem to be engaged in the study of a prac- 
tical question, a question of values. We seem to be inquiring no 
longer about the truth of things, but about their worth or good- 
ness, and particularly about the worth or goodness of a certain 
class of things, namely, human actions. In psychology we study 
human behavior as it 7s. In ethics we also study human behav- 
lor, but now from a wholly different point of view, namely, that 
of approval or disapproval. 

Since ethics has to do with practice, it has been called a prac- 
tical science. Sciences which are concerned with a knowledge of 
facts are sometimes called theoretical or natural sciences, such 
as biology, psychology, chemistry, physics. Sciences which are 
concerned, not with a knowledge of facts, but with ends to be 
gained or values to be realized, are called practical or normative 
sciences. There are three general sciences of this kind, logic, 


400 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


ethics, and esthetics, and many special ones, such as medicine, 
agriculture, metallurgy. 

Now, in most practical sciences, such, for instance, as medi- 
cine, there is a perfectly definite end to be gained, namely, the 
conservation of health. Likewise the end is clear and definite in 
other practical sciences, such as agriculture or horticulture, and 
the rules and regulations for attaining this end are quite well 
understood. But in the case of that practical science called 
ethics neither the end to be gained nor the means of gaining it 
is wholly beyond dispute. Hence it presents a problem in phi- 
losophy. It seems strange, does it not, that while in all the lesser 
practical sciences, such as the ones mentioned, we know just 
what we wish to accomplish, in ethics, the practical science of 
human conduct in general, we do not know just what end we 
seek to gain? Some have said that what all men wish to attain 
is happiness, while others have said that it is not happiness, but 
virtue; while still others have thought that it is self-realization, or 
peace, or obedience to the voice of duty or to conscience, or to the 
will of God. 

We are evidently engaged here in studying, not behavior, as 
in psychology, but good and bad behavior; that is, conduct. 
Matthew Arnold said that conduct is three fourths of life, which 
means, I suppose, that three fourths of the time our behavior is 
either good or bad. So we have to find out what makes behavior 
good or bad. 

When we were children our parents told us that some actions 
were right and some were wrong and that we “must not” do the 
wrong things, and “must” do the right ones. We discovered, 
however, that we were free to do the wrong things, if we chose, 
and often did so, and then some kind of punishment was apt to 
follow. In our early philosophical moods perhaps we asked our- 
selves why some actions were called right or good, and some 
wrong or bad; and possibly we were told that wrong was what 
God forbade and right was what he commanded. And this 


1This distinction should not be pressed too closely, for any such practical 
science as ethics is also theoretical, since it investigates the general principles of 
conduct and the origin and meaning of conscience. This is no doubt true also 
of all the practical sciences. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 401 


answer probably satisfied us for a while, but afterwards we began 
to inquire why God commanded certain things and forbade 
others. 

Then also there is the question of duty, that curious feeling 
of obligation — the ‘‘ought”’ feeling. Even granting that there 
are certain actions that are right and others that are wrong, why 
ought I to do the right, and whence that strange feeling of duty? 
They used to tell me that it was the voice of conscience. But 
what is conscience? Is it an infallible guide that I should follow, 
and if so where does conscience get its authority? 


How not to study this subject 

Probably there is no chapter in philosophy so important as 
this one relating to the theory of conduct. It has more than a 
theoretical interest satisfying our thirst for knowledge; it bears 
directly on our own manners and morals. And yet it is very 
easy for the student to study it in a merely academic manner — 
and fail to see its practical bearing. He will cheerfully assent to 
the professor’s conclusion that the highest good is service or love 
or righteousness or self-realization or duty, and straightway go 
out and pursue some other highest good without feeling the 
slightest need of making any mental readjustment at all. 

But there is a way to avoid perfunctory study of this kind, 
and that way is for the student or the reader to try to think the 
problem through on his own account before listening to any 
“oracles”? or reading any books on the subject. Never mind 
about the question of the Highest Good — just ask yourself, 
“What are the actual bona fide higher values in my own 
personal, present, or prospective life?” 

Another way to see the practical bearing of this subject would 
be to imagine that a new community was to be started on some 
far distant island, and that you and I were delegated to draw up 
a constitution for such a community and plan a set of institutions 
for it and a system of education. We could not do all this with- 
out first getting pretty clearly in mind what we wished to attain. 
Offhand we should probably say that what we wished to attain 
was the happiness of the people. This general phrase might sat- 


402 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


isfy us until we began to reflect upon it carefully. Then we 
should find that it is not sufficiently definite. Simply to make all 
the people happy all the time would be an ideal that would prob-. 
ably not appeal to any social reformer. 

The State Superintendent of Public Instruction stopped me 
in the hall one day and said that he wanted some ene to write 
a paper on the philosophy of education. After some questioning 
I found out that, having served certain years in his high office, 
he had finally come to the conclusion that it is useless to work 
over courses of study and methods of teaching until it is first 
clearly determined just what is to be accomplished for the young 
people. The philosophy of education is really the philosophy of 
life. Seen in this light the old problem of the highest good takes 
on a very practical aspect. 


Do ants and bees have duties? 

How shall we approach the difficult subject of human con- 
duct? There have been many schools of ethical theory and many 
diverse views. How can we find our way through this tangle of 
opinion? | 

It may be helpful to simplify the subject by studying it in the 
form presented to primitive men living in simple communities; 
or it might be even better to go back to the life of lower animals, 
especially those living in social groups like the ants and bees. Do 
they have “duties,” ‘‘moral obligations,” and ‘‘moral laws?” 
Do they act ‘‘rightly”’ and ‘“‘wrongly”’? Do they have a “high- 
est good’’? Whether or not any of these terms may be applied 
to the behavior of these insects, they certainly exhibit in their 
instinctive actions a very high degree of coéperation toward a cer- 
tain end; and that end is the well-being of the swarm or colony; 
and this well-being would seem to consist in the prosperous and 
continuous life of the species. These animals like all others seem 
to be concerned very much with three things, food, protection, 
and reproduction — in one word, life; not the life of the individ- 
ual which is often ruthlessly sacrificed, but the life of the group; 
and not merely the life of the immediate group, but of the present 
and succeeding generations. Now, if the ants and bees had 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 403 


moral laws and punishments for the offenders and a sense of 
right and wrong, it is evident that these would all be directed 
toward this one end or highest good, the life of the species. 

The behavior of the individual ants and bees is what from a 
human point of view we should call good behavior, because it is 
directed quite unerringly toward the well-being of the group; 
and the reason why there is so little bad behavior is that animal 
behavior has been mechanized through the ages either by the 
action of natural selection or in other ways. This mechanized 
behavior we call instinct, and its action is so perfect that the 
well-being of the group is attained without the presence of laws 
and lawgivers and crimes and punishments, but of course at the 
sacrifice of the higher values which arise in a society of free 
individuals. 

There is nothing, then, in the analogy of the bees and ants 
which will help us in the Theory of Morals except the very im- 
portant fact that among these simple animals the welfare or 
well-being of the group or species is the end or goal of their activ- 
ities, and that good behavior (instinct) is the condition of that 
well-being. If we could apply this to human society and believe 
that social well-being is the highest good, and that “‘good”’ or 
“right”? conduct is that which conditions this well-being, and 
that all those moral laws which have been preached to us from our 
infancy are simply those rules of action which racial experience 
has found necessary for social welfare, why, then, the whole sub- 
ject of ethics would be greatly simplified. 


Life as highest good 

Perhaps, then, life is the highest good, the summum bonum, 
which philosophers have long sought. At any rate, life is good; 
whether it is the highest good we may ask later on. All nature 
seems to strive toward life. The conative impulse, the will-to- 
life, the élan vital, the struggle for existence, which have con- 
fronted us so often, whether we were studying the origin and 
nature of life, the philosophy of evolution, or the philosophy of 
mind, seem now to offer us a foundation for the philosophy of 
conduct. Ethics would then be that practical science which 


404 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


considers the ways and means of successful living, just as agricul- 
ture considers the means of successful farming. Moral laws, 
in that case, would be the rules for successful living; and pre- 
sumably the moral laws actually in vogue would be the rules 
which the experience of social groups has found necessary for 
successful living. 

This conclusion would be, of course, altogether too simple to 
provide a theory of morals for human beings, but it might be use- 
ful as an introduction to get the matter clearly before us. The 
welfare of bees and ants is quite easily defined, but human wel- 
fare presents much more difficulty; you and I might not agree as 
to what successful living is. 


Conduct among primitive men 

Before we attack this problem it may help us to consider the 
situation in primitive human groups. Ants and bees do not have 
moral laws, nor duties, nor consciences, nor any moral sense. 
Neither do any animals, although among some gregarious 
types of mammals individual offenders against the common 
interest are killed or driven from the herd. Only man is a 
- moral being, consciously reflecting upon right and wrong be- 
havior, approving or disapproving, voluntarily choosing, and 
suffering regret for wrongdoing. In man behavior becomes 
rational, and with rational behavior or conduct arise morality, 
conscience, ethical judgment. 

All these exist in primitive human society, mingled with many 
social instincts brought over from the subhuman inheritance. 
But in human society the actions of the individual are not wholly 
determined by instinct, although the social instincts are still 
present, as when the mother instinctively defends her child, or 
the war frenzy flashes through a community. Human actions 
become voluntary actions, determined by custom and authority. 
Morality now passes through the stage of social habits or customs 
made binding upon the individual by public approval or dis- 
approval, by the favor or anger of tribal gods, and by the opera- 
tion of physical force in the form of punishments administered 
by the tribal authorities. Something called public opinion arises, 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 405 


carrying approval or disapproval of certain actions. Pressure is 
brought upon individuals in the way of constraint or restraint to 
do or not to do certain things which are considered to be condu- 
cive or detrimental to the common good. Hence conscience 
arises, a kind of inner echo of the approval or disapproval of cer- 
tain kinds of conduct by the group. Judgment is passed upon 
one’s own conduct or that of others, as it is supposed to bear 
upon the common good. Hence arises moral judgment. 

When all these things happen in a primitive community, then 
morality has come. Not all kinds of action are moral actions, 
but only the voluntary conduct of rational beings considered in 
respect to its worth in leading to a certain end. 

When men live in communities many egoistic impulses have to 
be suppressed for the sake of the common good. ‘The sentinel in 
time of war stationed at his post to guard the camp must for the 
common good sacrifice his desire to sleep. Thus duty arises, an 
action contrary to inclination, but demanded for the good of the 
community. The sense of obligation is now experienced by the 
individual, aroused by the force of approval or disapproval of 
public opinion, together with the dread of punishment either 
human or divine or the hope of reward. Under the sanction of 
law and authority the man says “I must’’; but the “I must” 
becomes the ‘‘I ought”? when the instinctive sympathy and love 
which belong to man’s original nature are added to the external 
sanctions and the consciousness of public approval or disap- 
proval. The sense of obligation may be defined as a certain com- 
pulsion in the form of public approval, in which I myself share, 
to act against my immediate selfish interests, when I feel myself 
free so to act or not. Finally character appears, by which we 
mean the general reliability of an individual to act in conformity 
to duty, or to do the things which are considered right, and avoid 
those which are considered wrong. 

It was in this way that man came to be a free moral agent. 
It represented a mighty step upward in evolution when moral 
conduct took the place of social instincts. A new set of values 
came to Mother Earth when rational beings began to reflect upon 
the worth of actions and freely to choose the higher values. 


406 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Then were born free personalities, having both rights and duties, 
perceiving differences in values and making free choices. Then 
for the first time character was possible, that greatest of all great. 
words. Kant said that there is nothing in the Universe grander 
than the good-will — or, as we should say, character. 

The evolution of morals 

But the reader may ask, “How did it all come about? How 
did the social instincts of gregarious animals change into the 
moral judgments of intelligent men?” When that brilliant 
speculation known as Darwinism burst upon the world, it was 
thought at first that its principles could be applied to ethics and 
would solve the old puzzle about the origin of man’s moral na- 
ture. It was only necessary to suppose that moral action had 
survival value, and then, if by chance such action appeared as 
the result of variation, any persons or groups so furnished would 
have an advantage in the struggle for existence and so perpetuate 
moral traits. Probably few writers on ethics now would at- 
tempt to explain the coming of morality by the natural selection 
of small variations, for the development, though indeed slow, 
has been too rapid for that; but if man’s moral nature could be 
conceived to have arisen in that way, our interest would be cen- 
tered at once upon the cause of the variations in the direction 
of morality — and, behold, the problem would confront us as 
before. ; 

There has undoubtedly been an evolution of man’s moral 
nature, but his moral nature has not been evolved out of the 
social instincts of the lower animals, because there is vastly more 
in moral character than in social instincts. It has been rather 
a growth in which new qualities and higher values have been 
slowly realized: it seems more like an “‘epigenesis” than like 
an evolution — a new birth, something achieved, a higher round 
of the ladder gained. 

Perhaps the only way that we can hope to understand the evo- 
lution of the moral from the non-moral is to believe that there is - 
some force at work, some driving force, or craving, or cosmic 
interest, which is struggling to realize these higher values. A 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 407 


recent writer on ethical theory ! speaks of the will in its efforts 
after self-expression as manifesting itself in two separate ideals: 
first, that of altruism, either toward persons or toward science 
and art; and, second, self-expression. If we can believe, as has 
been suggested in a former chapter, that evolution itself is a pro- 
cess due to the working of two ultimate tendencies, one toward 
self-preservation, and the other toward self-sacrifice, the origin 
of man’s moral nature will be less dark. 

But the actual method through which the creative will pro- 
ceeds to self-expression — if we wish to use these terms in ex- 
plaining evolution itself — seems to be through rational thought 
or creative intelligence. When man begins to think, he can al- 
ways think of a better way. The origin of morality was prob- 
ably not different in method from the progress of morality at the 
present day. Customs and moral laws are being constantly re- 
fined. When we got rid of human slavery, we saw that there 
were other forms of slavery which were also wrong, such as that 
_ exhibited in child labor in factories or the tyranny of capital over 
labor. Taking property belonging to another and taking human 
life are morally wrong; yet they were not thought to be wrong 
by primitive people, provided the one who suffered belonged to 
another tribe. But there came a time when theft and murder 
were wrong under any circumstances. Somebody’s conscience 
told him that there was a higher law. Antigone in Sophocles’ 
drama refused to obey the order of the King, because her con- 
science told her that there was a higher law. Jesus, Savonarola, 
Luther, and all our prophets and reformers have stood out 
against custom and tradition and proclaimed a better way. It 
is for this reason that the intuitional school of moralists has 
taught that conscience is a sort of God-given faculty, having im- 
mediate insight into right and wrong. Empiricists, on the other 
hand, have said that there is no such faculty, our higher know- 
ledge coming from experience. But the situation is probably not 
well described by either of these schools. What we seem to have 
is a constantly enlarging insight into better methods, a more 


1 J, H. Muirhead, article ‘“‘ Ethics” in Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and 
Ethics. 


408 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


penetrating vision, a better judgment of values. In man we 
may call it rational thought; in the beginning we may perhaps 
call it the ‘‘ power which makes for righteousness.” 


Partial summary 

We seem, then, to have made thus far some progress in under- 
standing the origin and meaning of certain of our ethical con- 
cepts. Right actions are those which conduce to social welfare. 
The social instincts guide the lower animals to this end. In man 
social instincts are replaced by free voluntary action, guided, but 
no longer infallibly guided, by social customs and moral laws, 
enforced by legal, social, or divine sanctions. In such a situa- 
tion, reflective moral judgment, conscience, and duty necessarily 
arise. Gradually the social customs and moral laws are them- 
selves refined by experience, and by the operation of reflective 
thinking and the insight of gifted leaders. And this whole move- 
ment from instinct to morality arises, we believe, as a part of 
the whole process of growth which we call creative or emergent 
evolution. 

While we may be able to understand in this way what moral 
laws are, and how they have grown up, and what duty and con- 
science mean, and how they have arisen, there is one concept 
which we have repeatedly used in the discussion, but have not 
carefully defined — this is the concept of social welfare. Right 
actions are those which conduce to social welfare, but what is 
social welfare? So long as we are discussing swarms of bees or 
ants, flocks of birds or herds of animals, there is no great diffi- 
culty in defining welfare. It is the physical survival of the group 
or species. 

But when we turn to human society, this definition of welfare 
is no longer adequate. Human beings have higher aims than 
mere physical survival, or life. It is just here that the disagree- . 
ment has arisen among the several schools of writers on the 
theory of ethics. It is the old problem of the Highest Good. 


The Highest Good 
What, then, are those higher values which are the goal of 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 409 


human effort? If, as was intimated above, moral laws are the 
rules for successful living, what kind of living is successful living? 
If you or I had to draw up a constitution for a new social order or 
write a philosophy of education, what would we decide to be the 
end toward which our efforts should be directed? It is not suffi- 
cient to mention a number of virtues, such as temperance, cour- 
age, wisdom, justice, love, codperation; or ideals, such as free- 
dom, equality, opportunity; we must find, if possible, some gen- 
eral principle, which shall serve as a criterion of social welfare. 
Several such principles, as we have seen, have been put forward 
in the history of ethical theory, namely, pleasure, happiness, self- 
realization, the activity of our highest powers, or merely obedi- 
ence to duty. These may be embraced under three general the- 
ories relating to the Hihical End or Highest Good. First, the 
hedonistic theories regard pleasure or happiness as the end. 
Second, the perfection theories regard self-realization or activity 
as the end. Third, the intuition theories regard unconditional 
obedience to duty as the end. These have all had a very impor- 
tant historical development, each represented by eminent schol- 
ars, ancient and modern. 


Hedonism 

Hedonism is from a Greek word meaning pleasure. In its 
simplest form it is the doctrine that pleasure is the highest good. 
In its more carefully developed form it teaches that this is 
happiness, especially the happiness of the greatest number. As 
such it is called Utilitarianism. A Greek philosopher named 
Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates, first proposed the view that 
pleasure is the highest good, and he had reference to the pleas- 
ure of the individual, not being interested in social welfare. As 
for pleasures, he held mere physical or bodily pleasures in the 
highest regard. 

Epicurus, founder of the Epicurean school of philosophy, re- 
fined the theory and, while still making pleasure the highest good, 
emphasized mental rather than physical pleasures, and thought 
that in the end the greatest pleasure could be gained by freedom 
from fear and anxiety and by studious avoidance of any cause of 


410 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


pain or worry. Epicurus himself lived a very simple and abste- 
mious life and enjoined simplicity and virtue upon his disciples. 

In modern times a much more serious attempt to construct an 
ethical philosophy on the basis of happiness was made by the 
eminent English thinkers, Hobbes, Bentham, and Mill. The 
theory of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) may be mentioned as 
the best expression of modern Utilitarianism. With Bentham, 
pleasure is still the highest good, not the pleasure of the mo- 
ment, but of a lifetime; and not the pleasure of the individual, 
but of the greatest number. The latter qualification was an all- 
important one, marking the arrival of the social element in eth- 
ical theory. Bentham was interested in finding some universal 
principle which should serve as the basis of all legislation, and he 
found it in the principle of “the greatest happiness for the greatest 
number”? — called the principle of utility. It is this which is the 
measure of right and wrong. 

A still further refinement of Hedonism was made by John 
Stuart Mill (1806-73). In his little book, entitled Utilitarian- 
ism, will be found a clear and concise statement of his view. He 
accepts the principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest 
number, but he makes a very important modification of Ben- 
tham’s doctrine in that he recognizes a difference in quality among 
pleasures, some pleasures being better than others. That there 
is such a difference seems to be true, but it represents the aban- 
donment of the strict hedonistic ethics. Bentham had consist- 
ently denied any such qualitative difference, pleasures being 
measured quantitatively. Quantity being equal, the pleasures 
of art, poetry, or philanthropy are no better than the pleasures 
of the senses. This Mill denied. ‘‘It is better,’’ he said, “to be 
a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Soc- 
rates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” ! Undoubtedly, but why? 
If we could think this through, we should find the ethical prob- 
lem solved. Mill himself did not give a satisfactory answer to this 
question. He seemed to think that it is to be determined by the 
judgment of those best qualified to judge — by those who have 
had experience with both kinds of pleasure. However this diffi- 


1 Utilitarianism, p. 14. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 411 


culty may be met, the fact of the qualitative difference in pleas- 
ures seems to weaken the logical position of Hedonism. It intro- 
duces some other standard for right conduct than pleasure itself. 

Hedonism has been weakened also by a better knowledge of 
the psychological motives of human actions. The desire for 
happiness is not the primary motive of action. Weare creatures 
of impulse. By instinct, habit, or custom we crave not happi- 
ness nor pleasure, but specific things. We want a piece of land, 
a new car, a dance-date, a fur coat (or at least a fur collar), a 
position, a husband, or a wife. People want to exercise power, 
to rule, to succeed in business or in a profession, to make a lot of 
money, to gain praise or acclaim, to win in the election, to be 
noticed on the street, to be asked to join a fraternity or sorority, 
to write a book, to be an actor or movie star, to carry through 
some reform, to minister to the sick, to champion a great cause. 

Furthermore, in our judgment of values we do not appraise 
happiness — certainly not pleasure—as the highest good. 
There are other things which we rank higher — genius, ability, 
devotion to ideals, heroism, self-sacrifice, public service, origin- 
ality. Our biographies are not those of happy people. Jesus 
was a man of sorrows. Socrates was executed as a criminal. 
Lincoln fell a victim of a great cause. To be sure, we may say 
that we honor these men because they suffered for the happiness 
of others. Butdidthey? Were they not martyrs to their efforts 
for specific things, to things we count good in themselves, right- 
eousness, wisdom, freedom? We assume that happiness usually 
accompanies the good life, but it does not seem itself to be the 
highest good. Pleasure accompanies the fulfillment of func- 
tion, but it is not the motive of action. 


Energism 

The second theory of the highest good we have called the Per- 
fection Theory, or the Self-realization Theory. The term Ener- 
gism has been applied to it and is perhaps the better name. This 
view has the prestige given it by the support of Plato and Aris- 
totle, and is held by many recent writers. Plato said that the 
highest good is a harmoniously developed personality, a con- 


412 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


dition in which every faculty functions in a perfect way without 
infringing upon any other faculty. The good man is one In whom 
appetite, reason, and courage work in harmony, no one of them - 
being in excess. 

Aristotle’s book, called the Nicomachean Ethics, is one of the 
ereat books of the world on ethical theory. Well-being, he said, 
is a functional conception. A good horse or a good sword is one 
that perfectly performs the functions of a horse or sword. ‘The 
highest good is found in the normal activity of our highest 
powers. To Aristotle, as to all the Greeks, man’s highest activ- 
ity is intellectual. He is a thinker, and the exercise of thought 
ig what Aristotle ranks so high. God to him is essentially a 
thinker, the thought of thought — pure thought. Hence ra- 
tional activity is Aristotle’s notion of the highest good, ex- 
pressed in scientific research, in philosophical thought, in the 
quest of truth. 

In modern times Energism usually takes the form of self-real. 
ization, in which, however, the principle of activity is still the 
essential one. With our Northern and Western ideas we do not 
look upon reason as the only noble function of man, although we 
rank intellectual activity very high. We prize creative work of 
any kind, invention, exploration, initiative, adventure. We 
prize algo, as indeed the Greeks did, artistic creation and the ex» 
ercise of the faculty of appreciation, and religious activity, and 
wonder and worship. We think of congenial work and play, of 
recreation and sport and of social relations of all kinds. The end 
in view is to be a person, and to exercise all the powers and enjoy 
all the privileges of a person, to develop all that is inherent in per: 
sonality. In accordance with the principle of self-realization 
Everett in his important book entitled Moral Values makes 
a, table of values based on the idea of functional activity. He 
arranges them in eight groups as follows: 


I. Economie Values V. Character Values 
TI. Bodily Values VI. Asthetic Values 
TIT. Values of Recreation VII. Intellectual Values 
IV. Values of Association VIII. Religious Values 4 


1 Walter Goodnow Everett, Moral Values, p. 182. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 413 


Disregarding for the moment Everett’s fifth class, called 
character values, his table is instructive, showing how bedily 
health and strength, sports and recreations, friends, the produc- 
tion and appreciation of works of art, rational thought, wonder 
and worship, are all good in themselves, because they represent 
the exercise of our powers. 


Character values 

But now what about those character values which Everett has 
placed fifth in his list? What are they and why has he put them 
in this place? Evidently we have here to consider the relation 
of the individual to society. If self-realization is to be the high- 
est good, is it to be the individual self which is to be realized or 
the social self — or is there, indeed, any social self? ‘‘ Loyalty 
to the great community” has sometimes been taken to be the 
supreme value, as if the community itself were the end to be 
realized. Possibly a little reflection here may help to clear 
this up. 

Suppose we assume, for the sake of the argument, that the per- 
fection of the individuals composing a community is the highest 
good. Since man is a social being and lives in communities, it 
is evident that he must contrive to get along with his fellow men 
before he can begin to realize any of his individual aims. Since 
his selfish interests come in conflict with the selfish interests 
of others, a set of social duties will arise, obedience to which 
conditions the very existence of society. Honesty, veracity, 
justice, regard for the lives and property of other men, regard 
for the wives and daughters of other men, are some of the duties 
which make life in a healthy social group possible. The fate 
of the individual is bound up with the fate of society. These 
social duties will be in the focus of attention, but this does not 
mean that they are themselves the highest values, but that they 
are indispensable to the realization of any values whatever. 
Hence, when one speaks of loyalty to the Great Society as the 
supreme good, this is because it is something which is abso- 
lutely fundamental. So vital are our duties to society that 
the word character has reference almost wholly to our social 


414 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


duties. Character values may therefore well stand at the head 
of any list of values — conditioning all the others. The order 
in Everett’s table may thus be open to criticism. 

This does not mean that social duties are instrumental aes 
or that prudential motives alone enjoin virtue, for men are bound 
together by sympathy, making of society an organic unity, each 
one sharing in the good or ill of all. Society is, indeed, the larger 
self, but it is of the individual self that we are speaking when we 
use the expression self-realization as the ethical end. 

Various attempts have been made to formulate the highest 
good in accordance with the principle of self-realization, bring- 
ing the individual and society into their proper relations. The 
two formulas following may serve as examples: 

The end of all moral action is ‘‘a social order in which each 
member of the group may have a fair field for his activities and 
the fullest opportunity for self-realization without infringing 
upon the similar right of every other member of the group in the 
present or in future generations.” The ultimate good is “A 
social order in which the highest potentialities of each individual 
are developed to the maximum, and in which these potentialities 
are expended in the interests of that order to guarantee its sta- 
bility and permanence.” 

In each of these statements the organic unity of society, the 
supremacy of the character values over all others, and the prin- 
ciple of self-realization of the individuals in society are fully 
recognized. 

It is probable that in the years to come we shall have to put 
more and more emphasis upon the character values; and the rea- 
son for this is that, as the world gets filled with people, as geo- 
graphical expansion is no longer possible, as nations crowd one 
another in every continent, it becomes more and more difficult 
to live together in peace and harmony. Nations jostle one 
another and parties within a nation clash. In times of war or 
civil strife or political turmoil there is little opportunity for the 
development of those other values which self-realization involves 
— intellectual, esthetic, or recreational. The only way that 
people or nations can live together in harmony is by the practice 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 415 


of the character values, codperation, justice, respect for law, self- 
restraint and self-control. 

Many circumstances in our modern life, economic, social, and 
political, have combined to relax the feeling of responsibility and 
the need of self-restraint on the part of the individual. Tyler, in 
rather vigorous if not extreme language, puts it as follows: 

Occidental man, most of all here in America, is a spoiled child. 

Tn our use of the gifts of a bountiful nature, we resemble a parcel of 
spoiled and ill-mannered children who have broken into their mother’s 
well-stocked preserve closet where she has put aside a rich supply of 
good things against a day of thanksgiving and a winter of need. They 
have stuffed themselves, destroyed what they could not devour, wasted 
nearly all, quarreled with one another, and have left ruin behind them. 
They are bitter in their outcries against any and every neighbor who 
refuses to allow them similarly to misuse his property. 

They will emerge dirty, nauseated, ill-tempered, an unpleasant sight 
and a neighborhood nuisance. They all unite in blaming their mother 
for not having secured the door and brought them up better. They 
need a sound spanking, a cold bath, a large dose of physic, and school 
early to-morrow morning.} 


The new character values 

It seems, indeed, that a new set of moral values is coming into 
the foreground as a result of the modern social situation. The 
values which have been preached to us in the past from every 
pulpit and platform are Liberty, Equality, Opportunity, Eff- 
ciency, Democracy, Organization, Science, Invention, and Dis- 
covery. We still believe in them heartily and fully, but the time 
has come when our attention must be focussed upon other values 
which condition the existence and welfare of society itself, such 
as Discipline, Self-restraint, Self-control, Respect for Law, Obe- 
dience to Law, Limitation of Desires, Temperance, Coéperation, 
Education. The practice of these virtues has become urgent and 
imperative. We can understand why Loyalty to the Great Com- 
munity and even Loyalty to Loyalty have been advocated by 
distinguished philosophers as supreme values. This, perhaps, 
will help us also to understand the third theory of the highest 
good, which we shall consider later. 

1 John M. Tyler, The Coming of Man (Marshall Jones Company), p. 89. 


416 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


Character values as duties and moral laws 

So supremely important are the character values that they 
come to us in the form of duties — not merely values — duties 
which we owe to society or to God. And not only are they 
duties, but they are laws— moral laws. Society itself, in its 
organized capacity as the State, enjoins them and enforces them 
with rigid sanctions; and God is represented as handing them 
down engraven plainly on tables of stone and as inflicting severe 
punishments for their infraction. Thou shalt not steal nor even 
covet thy neighbor’s property, nor do any murder, nor commit 
adultery, nor bear false witness. They are the minimum condi- 
tions on which any society of men can exist and prosper. They 
represent the boiled-down and concentrated experience of the 
ages as to the conditions of living in communities. 

But men are free agents, and the powerful motives of self- 
interest seem to conflict with the good of society — hence the 
moral laws will not always be obeyed. When they are not 
obeyed, what will happen? Few people, I fear, ever think this 
through. Perhaps some have reasoned no further than the 
policeman’s club and the possibility of escaping it. If I sin, the 
law will get me. But perhaps it will not get me. If so, all is well. 

Next comes the sanction of public opinion, the disapproval of 
our fellow men, more powerful, no doubt, as a deterrent from evil 
than the laws of the State. But what will happen if an individ- 
ual acts contrary to public opinion, or — and here is the graver 
question — what will happen if public opinion grows lax and the 
community no longer frowns upon the evil doer? ‘“‘Everybody’s 
doing it”? removes the odium which was formerly attached to the 
evil deed. To meet these various cases and to provide what 
seems to be the absolutely necessary sanction for moral law, 
there has long been held.a belief in a system of rewards and pun- 
ishments in a future life. Often enough in this life we see the 
wicked prosper and the good man suffer. The eternal law of jus- 
tice seems to demand that there be some compensation some- 
where. It must be in a life after death. This was the well- 
known argument for the existence of God and for the immortality 
of the soul put forward by the philosopher Kant. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 417 


But the punishment for sin in a future life can act as a deter- 
rent from evil only in case it is accepted as an article of faith, 
and even then it seems not always to be effective. So we must 
still press our question — What will happen in a community 
when offenders escape the law, when public opinion becomes lax, 
and when the belief in a future life has grown dim? 'The answer 
to this question is apparent. What would happen among gre- 
garious animals if instinct failed? The group or the whole species 
would become extinct. What has happened among primitive 
men when social morale has failed? The group has been anni- 
hilated, or absorbed by some neighboring group in which morale 
has not failed. What will happen in our modern complex social 
groups if the laws of conduct which experience has found neces- 
sary for social welfare fail to be observed? Social dissolution 
must be the outcome. As long as the heart of society is sound, 
individual offenders may be cared for. When the whole social 

body begins to be corrupt, social organization will gradually fail. | 


The social outlook , 

This bears directly upon the possible future of our own civil-. 
ization. History reveals no situation similar to that of our im- 
mense modern congested states. When in former times social 
morale failed, there were strong and virile people to the north to 
bring new blood and stern discipline. If social morale should 
fail now, if a disregard of the rules of healthy living should be- 
come general, would the dark ages which would follow have the 
seeds of a new and better era? I fear that the regeneration, al- 
though it would surely come, would be very slow. Perhaps there 
would intervene long centuries of social decadence with its ac- 
companying poverty and hunger, dirt and disease, and infinite 
pain and suffering. 

But social morale may not fail. There are regenerative forces 
within society now not known in former times. Social morale 
since the Great War seems, indeed, low. The world is full 
of wasters and grafters, and despoilers of women, and breakers 
of the law, and destroyers of the home, and traitors to peace and 
justice. But a new social conscience is arising, and there are 


418 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


visions of new values in the relations between individuals and 
between classes and between states. That a crisis has arisen in 
the moral progress of the world no one can doubt, but that dis- 
aster is Imminent is by no means sure. Above the rivalry of 
nations and the clash of classes, and above the hatred and sus- 
picion and fear which grew out of the war, there is the power of 
reflective thought which is slowly but surely discerning a better 
way to live. There are thousands upon thousands of honest 
men and women who have the clearer vision, and there have been 
a few great leaders who could see that the path of progress lies 
through righteousness and justice and codperation. Possibly 
we cannot count in these democratic days upon great leaders to 
save the world. Possibly we must depend upon universal edu- 
cation, which shall show that in our crowded social groups self- 
realization for the individual can come only from that self-sacri- 
fice and discipline which make coéperation possible. 

However this may be, since natural selection has largely ceased 
to operate in human society, nothing will save us from social dis- 
aster except obedience to the older laws of honesty, veracity, 
chastity, and justice, and the newer law of love and codperation 
enjoined by the conditions of our modern society. 


When all is said, there is nothing as yet to be changed in our old Aryan 
ideal of justice, conscientiousness, courage, kindness, and honor. We 
have only to draw nearer to it, to clasp it more closely, to realize it 
more effectively; and, before going beyond it, we have still a long and 
noble road to travel beneath the stars.! 


Social solidarity 

But there still remains a part of this perplexing problem to 
consider. Suppose we have a social order in which social morale 
is high, and in which clean living, social justice and social wel- 
fare prevail. Suppose that any individual in the social group 
should raise these questions: ‘‘Why am I under any obligation 
to obey the moral laws or the laws of the State? My own per- 
sonal interests conflict with the interests of the community. 


1 Maeterlinck, quoted by Drake, The Problems of Conduct. (Houghton Mifflin 
Company.) 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 419 


Why should I concern myself with the latter?’’ The answer to 
these questions appears again when we carry the matter back to 
small primitive groups or to groups of gregarious animals, where 
it is clearly seen that the welfare of the individual coincides with 
the welfare of the group. It can be seen even more clearly in the 
case of the family, where the solidarity of the group is evident. 
The mother would never ask why she should concern herself with 
the welfare of the son. They are a unit,and the unity of the family 
is an organic not a prudential unity. Society likewise is an 
organism in which the good of the whole is one with the good of 
the part. But in our immense modern complex social groups 
this organic unity is not so clearly seen by the individual, and 
so enemies of society appear on every side. Hence we see the 
absolute necessity of a system of education in which the relation 
of the individual to society shall be made perfectly clear. 

As a matter of fact this social consciousness is extending its 
limits yearly, connecting us in the bonds of human sympathy not 
-merely with our own community and nation, but with the whole 
world. The League of Nations is one of the countless move- 
ments in our own time designed to widen and solidify our human 
interests. And, still better, we are gradually becoming conscious 
of the unity of the present generation with generations to follow. 
We are beginning to understand that we cannot wantonly ex- 
haust our forests, our coal mines, our oil wells, and our soils; 
but that our duty to our children and to their children extends 
to the conservation of all our materia! resources, and, what is 
still more important, that our obligation extends to the conser- 
vation of our racial values, the physical and mental health of the 
race. The generations that are to come have the right to a sound 
physical and mental heritage. We can rob them of it in a hun- 
dred ways, by doping our brains with narcotics, by impurity and 
the excesses of sex, by sapping our physical energies through a 
life of luxury and ease, by living in airtight and overheated 
houses, by substituting a night life for that of the daylight day 
to which mankind has been accustomed for perhaps nearly a 
half-million years, and in many other ways. We boast of our 
obedience to the command, “Thou shalt not steal’’; but we do 


420 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


not realize what a lot of ways there are of stealing. We can steal 
the fuel and the food of coming generations, or we can steal their 
physical stamina. Our neighbor has a right to a square deal, 
neighboring nations have a right to a square deal, coming gen- 
erations have a right to a square deal. 

If we have followed this long argument through, we can under- 
stand how, if self-realization is the supreme good, the character 
values become the condition for the realization of all other values. 
Every man now and in succeeding generations demands a fair 
field for exercising his powers and developing his personality. 
This can only happen in a social order where justice prevails and 
where it extends beyond the narrow limits of one’s own commu- 
nity to the whole of mankind. So fundamental are our duties to 
others, so ingrained by social if not biological inheritance, that 
they seem often like the very voice of God in the form of human 
conscience. This will enable us to understand the third theory 
of the highest good, which we may now consider. 


Intuitionism 

At first the theory of Intuitionism, or Absolutism, or Aprio- 
rism, as it is sometimes called, is a little hard to understand. We 
can see how happiness might be regarded as the highest good, 
or social welfare, or self-realization; but what can it mean to say 
that duty is the highest good? Duty, we supposed, was simply 
the obligation placed upon us for pursuing some moral value, and 
the moral value itself must first be determined. But Intuition- 
ists do not speak primarily of value; they speak of right and 
wrong, and of conscience and duty. The human mind knows in- 
tuitively what is right and what is wrong, and duty must be done 
for duty’s sake. There is in man a special “sense” or faculty or 
capacity, by which moral distinctions are immediately known. 
In all cases of doubt, follow your conscience; it is a God-given 
possession of every man. ‘There is an inner appreciation of the 
moral quality of actions, a kind of moral taste, which needs no 
explanation and does not come from experience. 

The philosopher Kant has given his authority to this ethical 
system. Kant’s whole moral system was an emphasis upon 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 421 


duty. The practical reason expresses itself in the form of a 
Categorical Imperative, which we should call the voice of duty. By 
a categorical imperative Kant means a downright unconditional 
command. ‘The will is self-legislative, issuing its orders cate- 
gorically. Unconditional obedience to the moral law is de- 
manded. It does not say 2f you would be happy, or 7f you would 
be perfect, or 2f social welfare is your end, you should do certain 
things. It says simply, Do right! Respect for the dignity of the 
moral law is the sole motive of moral action. The moral law is 
absolutely sacred. 


Kant loves to dwell on its awful sublimity. . . . Absolute truthfulness, 
absolute respect for the rights and freedom of every one of your fellow 
men, with devotion to the cause of high-mindedness, of honesty, of jus- 
tice, of simplicity, of honor — such is Kant’s ideal, and so far as in him 
lay, he was always true to it. 


There is nothing then unconditionally good except a good will. 

But it does not seem enough to say, Do your duty. What is my 
duty? Kant supplies a formula which is capable of application 
to every situation: So act that the maxim of thy will may always hold 
good as a principle of universal legislation. Suppose that a sum 
of money were left in trust with me for a child. Suppose that, 
under the stress of some great financial difficulty, I think of using 
this money temporarily for myself, to be paid back, of course, in 
afew weeks. Is this right? Simply apply the rule. Would I 
wish this to become a general rule of action? 

To this excellent rule Kant adds another equally wholesome: 
So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or 1n that 
of another, always as an end, never as a means. No child, no 
woman, no laboring man, can ever be treated as a means to one’s 
own pleasure or profit. The human personality is sacred. 

Such is Kant’s remarkable and lofty system of intuitional 
ethics. It is perhaps the view commonly accepted by mankind. 
Do your duty, and do it because it is your duty. Some years ago 
a great ocean liner, the Titanic, sailing west on her maiden voy- 
age with a large passenger list including well-known and dis- 
tinguished men, struck an iceberg and sank. ‘There were not 

1 Royce, Spirtt of Modern Philosophy (Houghton Mifflin Company), p. 133. 


422 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


lifeboats to accommodate all, and the men, helping the women 
and children into the boats, calmly remained on the decks and 
went down. What was their motive for doing this? No one 
even suggested any other motive than duty. It was not for 
newspaper praise, nor reward in heaven, nor any other gain. It 
was simply the proper thing to do. 

No one questions either the grandeur or the practical working 
of Kant’s ethical system, which exalts a stern uncompromising 
obedience to duty; but it may be possible to explain the almost 
instant and apparently intuitive character of our moral sense in 
other ways than by the postulate of the ‘autonomy of the will.”’ 
The Empiricists would explain it as the result of individual or 
racial experience in living under a system of moral discipline. 
And as regards the formula above mentioned, so clearly practical 
in its application, it has been questioned whether, when I ask if 
I should wish the principle of my action to become a universal 
principle, some standard such as happiness or social welfare or 
the general good is not tacitly implied. 

If one cannot quite accept Kant’s rigorous Intuitionism, 
nevertheless there is an element of truth in this theory which 
other theories cannot ignore. When Mill recognizes a difference 
in the worth of pleasures, saying that those who have had ex- 
perience with both the higher and the lower kinds prefer the 
“higher”; when Everett makes a list of values ranking some as 
higher and others as lower; or when the Perfectionist speaks of 
the activity of our “highest” powers, the Intuitionist might in- 
quire, ‘‘How do we come to this judgment of value?” It would 
seem that it must be a matter of taste or insight or intuition or 
perception; and if you hope to escape from the Intuitionist’s 
position by saying that it is nothing but the power of rational 
thought working upon the materials of experience, remember 
that in rational thought itself there is an element of intuition or 
illumination and that on this often depend invention, discovery, 
scientific hypothesis, artistic creation, and moral progress. 


The convergence of theories 
It would appear that the three systems of ethics which we have 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 423 


called Hedonism, Energism, and Intuitionism are not three con- 
tradictory systems, one of which is true and the others false. 
Both Hedonism and Energism give us concrete and definite 
pictures of the highest good, the former finding it in happiness, 
the latter in the normal functioning of our faculties and powers, 
‘while Intuitionism provides a good, practical, working rule for 
realizing them. If Intuitionism errs in failing to recognize the 
importance of experience in the growth of our moral ideas, the 
empirical theories err in completely ignoring the element of in- 
tuition involved in all reflective thought — but especially as it 
appears in gifted leaders. 

And the dispute between the Hedonists and Energists need 
not be taken too seriously. It seems, however, more in accord 
with our present habits of thought to place the emphasis upon 
function and activity than upon the pleasure which accompanies 
them. We get a very good working plan for practical ethics and 
for social effort if we say that the highest good is a social order 
-in which every person shall have a fair field for his activities 
and the fullest opportunity for self-realization without infring~ 
ing upon the right of every other person, not excluding those of 
generations to come, to the same privileges. 

But whether we accept the doctrine of happiness or self-real- 
ization, we must not forget that first of all men have to live to- 
gether, and that the world is getting pretty crowded; so that it 
comes about that the emphasis must for the present be put upon 
character values, honesty, fidelity, veracity, justice, self-control, 
limitation of desires. In recent years too much stress has been 
placed upon self-expression in our educational system and par- 
ticularly in our avenues of popular education, such as fiction, 
poetry, drama, moving pictures, and newspapers; not because 
self-expression is not good, but because it is not primary. The 
primary virtues are the social virtues. When individuals, curb- 
ing their selfish interests, learn to live together, when nations, 
curbing their selfish nationalism, learn to live together, then the 
other values, intellectual, esthetic, recreational, may be realized. 
The lesson of codperation is clearly our first lesson. 

Thus we begin to understand why philosophers during all the 


424 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


ages have spoken of righteousness and justice as eternal values, 
coordinate with beauty and truth. Only the beautiful can rank 
with the good as an ultimate value which the world is trying to 
realize through human consciousness and social organization. 


Ethics and religion 

But even if moral conduct is a kind of absolute value which 
Nature is trying to realize, still the actual working of the moral 
law seems, to one reflecting upon it as we have done in this chap- 
ter, to have a certain aspect of harshness. If you would be 
happy, you must be righteous. If you are unrighteous, you will 
suffer — or, if not you, then your children, your neighbor, or 
your social group. I am afraid it is true that the moral law is, 
indeed, sometimes harsh. The laws of Nature and of God are un- 
bending. The unfit have been swept from the stage to make room 
for the fit. That the unfit should perish to make room for the 
fit is in the end beneficent. Possibly God could have thought 
of some better way to create free, intelligent, and moral beings 
than through the slow process of evolution, than through error 
and its punishment — but no man has proposed this better way. 

There is one means that has been found to soften somewhat 
the harshness of the moral law — and that means js religion. 
During all the ages religion has lightened the burden in some 
degree, not by annulling the consequences of unrighteousness, 
but by supplying motives to righteousness. The hard road of 
duty may be softened by love and loyalty. I fear that the law 
of consequences cannot be escaped; but what through stern duty 
may be onerous and difficult may, through willing loyalty, become 
a service of joy. Men do not like to be threatened and driven; 
but by love and friendship they may be readily led. Sometimes 
when they will not do right to escape evil consequences, they will 
eagerly do so out of loyalty, either to a great leader or to a great 
cause. 

Impulsive motives are stronger than prudential motives. 
Tell men that the unrighteous shall perish and they will do un- 
righteousness still — even though they know that the conse- 
quences of wrongdoing are fatally sure, falling upon them, or 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 425 


their kin, or their social group; but once call out their spirit of 
devotion — to God, to Master, or to friend — to husband, wife, 
or lover — to church or party, even to club or fraternity — and 
they will undergo hardship and practice self-denial. 

Religion teaches that the Universe is friendly — that God is 
love, and that deeper down than the law of competition there is 
the law of codperation; that altruism is as primordial as egoism. 
It teaches that in our struggle for right the Universe in its spirit- 
ual depths is on our side — so that the struggle is not in vain. 
When these spiritual powers are incarnated or personified in a 
visible leader, devotion reaches its perfection, and great things 
may be done. When no such leader appears, then education is 
indispensable — for the people must have either light or leader. 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert Williams (Long- 


mans, Green and Company), book 1. 


Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance (Houghton 
Mifflin Company), chap. Xv. 


Further references: 
Walter G. Everett, Moral Values. (Henry Holt and Company.) 


John Dewey and J. H. Tufts, Hthics. (American Science Series, Henry 
Holt and Company.) 


Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 
(The Macmillan Company) 2 vols. 


Friedrich Paulsen, System of Ethics. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct. (Henry Holt and Company.) 

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. (Longmans, Green and Company.) 

S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress. (Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner, 
and Company.) 

Durant Drake, Problems of Conduct. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 

L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution. (Chapman and Hall.) 

Theodore De Laguna, Introduction to Science of Ethics. (The Macmillan 
Company.) 

Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Benjamin Rand, The Classical Moralists. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 


CHAPTER XXIII 
THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 


ABKSTHETIC VALUES 


Objects of beauty 

On the walls of certain caverns in Southern France there are 
pictures of animals painted by the men of the Old Stone Age. 
They display a considerable degree of artistic skill and were 
painted so that they have endured for probably more than 
twenty-five thousand years. Evidently a great deal of effort was 
expended upon them by the artists who made them, effort which 
was economically unproductive, providing no food or clothing, 
and ministering to no material needs. When asked to explain 
these pictures, we say that they possess a certain quality which 
we call beauty, and that they give to the beholder a certain kind 
of pleasure, which we call esthetic pleasure. They belong to the 
sphere of art, and are thus quite outside the familiar field of 
economic enterprise, or love, or war, or moral and political in- 
stitutions. They introduce us to a new field of philosophical 
inquiry, in which new problems appear. 

If the reader is a college or university student and will let his 
thought rest for a moment on the buildings on his campus, he will 
at once recognize the fact that they differ in architectural merit, 
some, perhaps, being masterpieces of art and others having little 
or no merit of this kind. Furthermore, he will see that architec- 
tural merit is not judged on the ground of the practical utility of 
the building or its convenience for the purposes for which it was 
made, nor even its probable permanence and stability. It has 
or has not something else which we call beauty. 

He will find also that he is constantly making the same judg- 
ment in respect to the music which he hears at oratorios, con- 
certs, recitals, church services, dances, musical comedies. Some 
of it has the quality of artistic merit and some has not. He 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 427 


knows that the same is true of poetry and of paintings and sculp- 
tures and of landscapes and of human faces and of dress. 

What is this elusive thing we call beauty? Almost all we know 
about it is that it gives us a peculiar and lasting pleasure, which 
we understand is called esthetic pleasure. We do not know what 
beauty is, nor how esthetic pleasure differs from other kinds; but 
we do know that there is a supreme joy which we have felt in the 
contemplation of a beautiful building, painting, statue, land- 
scape, a woman’s face, tasteful dress, or in listening to music or 
the poetry of Shelley or Keats, or in watching or participating in 
the graceful movements of the dance. 


The science of esthetics 

Aisthetics is a normative science, like ethics and logic, be- 
cause it deals not with mere facts of experience, but with 
values. Aisthetics investigates the meaning of esthetic pleas-. 
ure, the objective or subjective character of beauty, and the 
~ nature of beauty itself, and the origin and nature of the art im-. 
pulse. All these questions have been discussed since the time 
of Socrates and many different answers have been given to 
them. 

That ssthetic pleasures play a very important part in our 
lives, and that among normative sciences esthetics may be com- 
parable with ethics and far more interesting than logic is evident 
if we reflect how much oftener we hear the expression, [sn’t that 
pretty or beautiful! than the expression, [sn’t that true, or good! 
Personal beauty and personal adornment seem also to take more 
of our thought and attention than our moral endeavor, or the 
logical consistency of our discourse. It is no wonder that 
thinkers from the time of Socrates have wondered about beauty 
and what it is in objects that makes them beautiful. 

It is evident that in esthetic enjoyment we have a value which 
adds immeasurably to the richness of life. Music, poetry, 
drama, literature, painting, and sculpture are a refuge for the soul 
wearied with the daily cares of business or politics or professional 
duties. Our American cities may be ugly in their monotonous 
architecture, but there are few cities or towns in which, as we 


428 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


come and go, the eye is not rested by at least one beautiful build- 
ing; while natural beauty awaits us everywhere, in wild and cul- 
tivated flowers, in fresh green lawns, in forest or ornamental 
trees, in waving fields of grain, in rivers, lakes, mountains, and 
sea, in the rainbow, in cloud effects, in the setting sun or the 
heavens at night, in the songs and motions of the birds and in 
their forms and plumage, in the gorgeous leaves of autumn or 
the fields covered with snow in winter, and in the human face 
and form. 

Since beauty is so good to enjoy, the philosophical impulse in 
man must be very strong to cause him to break in upon his 
ssthetic pleasure to inquire what sort of experience it is, or to 
pick to pieces an object of beauty to find out in what its beauty 
consists, or to psychologize on the motives of the artist at work 
upon some great painting. Nevertheless, the human mind with 
its restless longing to penetrate to all knowledge has from the 
earliest times been asking and trying to answer these very ques- 
tions. A course in the theory of art is indeed highly to be 
recommended. Quite apart from our interest in the theoret- 
ical questions, our own powers of appreciation may be greatly 
strengthened by such study, and the joy of Ife immeasurably 
enhanced by an initiation into a knowledge of the various sources 
of esthetic pleasure. 


Art periods in history 

Lately the metaphysical aspects of the beauty problem have 
been less emphasized and increasing interest has been shown in 
the historical, sociological, educational, and psychological sides 
of the subject. One writer has said that there has been a con- 
tinual slow decline in all the arts of Europe, except music, since 
the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly declining 
since the death of Beethoven.! Perhaps not all those competent 
to pronounce a judgment in such matters would agree with this 
critic. But if it be true, the question Why? involuntarily springs 
to our lips. Isit because of the lack of genius in our modern age, 
or because there is a lack of interest in art, or an urideveloped 

1 F, 8. Marvin. Progress and History, chap. 1x. Article by A. Clutton Brock. — 


t 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 429 


faculty of appreciation? ‘There is certainly in America to-day 
a widespread interest in art, particularly in music and poetry and 
architecture. But if we speak of relative interests, comparing 
our interest in fine arts with our devotion to mechanical and use- 
ful arts and to the acquisition of wealth and the accumulation of 
externalities, and then compare in this way our own age with 
that of the great art periods of history, as in ancient Greece or 
medieval and Renaissance Europe, the comparison is most un- 
favorable to us. 

There would seem to be three conditions necessary to a great 
art period: First, deep feeling seeking expression. Second, 
genius to express it in appropriate form. Third, a sympathetic 
audience able to appreciate and enjoy the productions of genius. 
Probably we fail in all of these as compared with the periods 
mentioned. But it is significant that there was a powerful reli- 
gious motive back of the great architecture of the Middle Ages 
and to a very large extent of the great painting, music, and 
- poetry of the Renaissance period. Religion and national feeling 
inspired also the work of the Greek masters. Their beautiful 
buildings were temples; their sublime drama originated in a reli- 
gious service and had usually religious history for its theme, and 
gods and goddesses figured prominently in their sculpture, paint- 
ing, and poetry. It will be one of the interesting questions which 
only the future can answer whether a great art period can spring 
from other than religious feeling, and if so what its powerful 
motive will be. 

In fact, this introduces us to a special problem in esthetics 
which holds our interest at the present time more than the old 
theoretical discussion about the nature of beauty. ‘This is the 
problem of the art impulse. Why do people compose music, 
write poetry, paint pictures, and model statues? We quickly see 
that the motives by which we explain other kinds of human ac- 
tivity will not apply here, namely, the hope of gain or fame or 
personal advancement. Products of art are too often economi- 
cally unproductive, and when they are not so, few of us would 
believe that economic or selfish motives are adequate to explain 
the creative work of the artist. We see that such motives 


430 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


would not apply to the drama, poetry, or sculpture of the an- 
cient Greeks, nor to the art products of any great art period in 
history. So, then, let us consider this part of esthetic theory 
first, the part, namely, which deals with the art impulse. Then 
in a second division we may consider some of the older and 
newer theories of beauty. Finally in the latter third of the 
chapter we may bring together some conclusions under the 
head of esthetic experience. 


I. The Art Impulse 


The fine arts 

When intelligence and skill are expended in productive activ- 
ity, we speak of this activity as art. If this activity is of such a 
kind as to lead to the production of objects of utility, we call it 
a useful art; if it leads to the production of objects of beauty, we 
call it a fine art. There is no difficulty whatever in explaining 
the presence, in a social group, of the useful arts, such as black- 
smithing or shoemaking or weaving, since they serve the vital 
needs of the people. But so far as we can see, works of fine art 
serve no such need. And yet, not only at the present time, but 
as far back as we can go in the history of man, the creative work 
of the artist, whether in music, painting, poetry, sculpture, 
architecture, or decoration, is discovered in every social group. 
What is its explanation? 

If it is a case of demand and supply, it is wholly unlike the 
operation of demand and supply in the economic world. We 
could not think of the creative activity of the poet or the musical 
composer as something done to meet a demand in the ordinary 
sense. Such activity is free and spontaneous, the outgoing of some 
creative impulse. It seems more like a form of self-expression. 
The artist has something to express, perhaps some deep emotion, 
for which ordinary language or gesture is inadequate. Language 
must be embellished, as in poetry, calling in the aid of rhythm and 
rhyme; or musical tones with their cadences and harmonies must 
be invoked. The artist or the poet or the musical composer is 
impelled by some insistent prompting to create something beau- 
tiful. The activity is spontaneous, instinctive — a kind of over- 


THE HIGHER VALUES OCF LIFE 431 


flowing. The artist himself cannot explain the impulse. It 
seems to him like an inspiration. 


The principle of social resonance 

But art is something more than the expression of deep emo- 
tion. There isa social element in it, which is really its significant 
part. Artis fundamentally social. In our quest for an explana- 
tion of the art impulse, we must turn both to the psychologist 
and the sociologist. The potential artist, with his profound emo- 
tion or his great thought or his new vision, not only desires to 
give adequate expression to his mental state, but he demands 
the sympathetic expression and the sympathetic experience of 
his fellow beings. 

The closest bonds of sympathy unite the members of a group. 
Each one shares the joys and sorrows of the others and each one 
wants others to share his own newfound joy — as many others 
as possible. The child, almost as soon as it can talk, cries, ‘‘Oh, 
mamma, come and see.”” Werun to our friend to have him share 
in some new beauty that we have found. No friend being pres- 
ent, we may even beg a stranger to share with us some gorgeous 
sunset or grand Alpine scene. 

We may think, therefore, of the artist as impelled to give ex- 
pression to some overmastering emotion, or, indeed, to some 
overmastering thought, in such a way as to gain a kind of social 
resonance through the sympathetic participation of his fellow 
men in his new possession. ‘The art impulse has thus been called 
“the pursuit of social resonance,’ 1 and the principle may be 
applied not only to the musical composer, the poet, the painter, 
and the sculptor, but to the man of the Old Stone Age, painting 
his picture of the bison on the walls of his cavern, or to the 
savage beating his tom-tom. 

But it is something more than mere sympathy which the artist 
asks and receives from his fellows; it is actual and active partic- 
ipation in his feelings, moods, and creative work. The organic 
unity between the members of society is much more intimate 


1 See the excellent account in Hirn’s Origins of Art, especially chaps. vi, vil, 
VIII. 


432 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


than we used to think when first we spoke of sympathy. The 
psychology and physiology of sympathy are better understood 
now. Sympathy extends to actual bodily movements, and when © 
the outer movements must be inhibited, it extends to incipient 
movements — muscular innervations or motor images. We wish 
to dance when we see others dance, but if we cannot dance with 
our whole bodies, we dance with parts of them, the sympathetic 
strains and tremors being felt in our legs and arms as we watch 
the dance. Hirn recalls the instance of the dancers brought into 
court for causing a disturbance, who, when asked to give an ex- 
hibition of the suspected performance, compelled both judge and 
jury to yield to the temptation, the sitting being dissolved in a 
wild dance carnival. Much of the pleasure in the enjoyment of 
art forms is now thought to be due to faint, incipient, and possi- 
bly subconscious movements, perhaps of the eye, perhaps of the 
muscles of the limbs or trunk. I shall refer again below to this 

‘‘internal imitation.”’ The artist, therefore, gains an actual 
sympathetic response from his fellows, his own emotion Dens 
enhanced by this social diffusion. 

The art impulse is thus a kind of extension or enlargement of 
one’s personality. We love to extend our personalities by means 
of a cane, or high-heeled shoes, or a tall hat, or by furs and 
feathers; but the kind of enlargement on the part of the artist 
that we are studying here is different. It is a social enlarge- 
ment, the instinctive need to have others think and feel with 
us; and the artist’s audience is not limited to his circle of friends 
or to his fellow townsmen, but extends to all the world and to 
posterity. 7 


Art and morals 

This principle of social resonance, I think, may explain the old 
difficulty about the relation of esthetics to ethics. Are there 
moral lessons in works of art? Does the artist aim to instruct 
or to edify? Is poetry written to teach a lesson? Is there 
any such thing as didactic poetry? Lucretius, for instance, is 
reckoned among the great poets of Rome. His De Rerum 
Natura seems to have been specially, if not deliberately, written 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 433 


to set forth a materialistic philosophy and to free men’s minds 
from fear. 

I think we must answer that, while the relation between art 
and conduct is very close, true art cannot have any primary 
moral purpose; its purpose is to please, not to instruct. Goethe 
said that to require moral ends in art means its destruction, al- 
though any true art will have moral consequences. The artist is 
never a preacher nor a teacher — he is just a sharer. He has a 
divine thought, a profound emotion, and his only wish is to share 
it with you and me. ‘The relation. of teacher to pupil is a lesser 
one; the motive of the artist is higher. Hence it follows that 
art is a great moral influence; it is the expression of our spiritual 
ideals, and the power of the artist for good is without limit. 
Greek art, at its best, was distinctly moral. It carried a great 
lesson, but never in the form of a lesson. It brought harmony 
and temperance and courage and justice; but it did not teach 
them. 


Art and social morale 

Art is thus the great harmonizer, the pacifier, the reliever. It 
relieves social tension, and conduces to peace and good-will. 
Works of art are not objects of desire. We love to have others 
share in our esthetic joy, so that the eternal strife over mine and 
thine, as it pertains to houses and lands and material goods, is 
abated in times of esthetic enjoyment, and life is lifted to a higher 
plane. The soothing effect of music upon us as individuals is 
familiar, but it produces social harmonies as well as harmonies 
of soul. 

Hence we can understand the social importance of art. It 
has been from the earliest times of primitive man a socializing 
agency, integrating the people, uniting them in the bonds of 
social sympathy. It has strengthened social morale to an un- 
known degree. Unfortunately, the socializing and moralizing 
influence of art has probably never been so slight as it is to-day, 
perhaps not because of lack of activity in artistic production, 
but rather because of the relative lack of interest in it as com- 
pared with other forms of human activity. The actual moral 


484 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


life of the people is not touched by the influence of art as it has 
been at other periods.1 


The play motive in the art impulse 

By many writers, notably by the poet Schiller and the philo- 
sopher Herbert Spencer, the creative impulse of the artist has 
been likened to the play instinct of children, being free and spon- 
taneous and having no direct life-serving end. We work because 
we must in order to gain something that we need — food, shelter, 
clothing; we play just because we wish to play. Our overflowing 
energy needs an outlet of some kind. So it is with art, which is 
the simple outgoing of our creative powers finding expression in 
activity beyond the requirements of our daily life. This is well 
illustrated in Dr. Edman’s interesting description of the emer- 
gence of the fine arts: 


In the sharp struggle of man with his environment, those instincts 
survived which were of practical use. The natural impulses with which 
a human being is at birth endowed, are chiefly those which enable him 
to cope successfully and efficiently with his environment. But even in 
primitive life, so exuberant and resilient is human energy that it is not 
exhausted by necessary labors. The plastic arts, for example, began in 
the practical business of pottery and weaving. ‘The weaver and the 
potter who have acquired skill and who have a little more vitality than 
is required for turning out something that is merely useful, turn out 
something that is also beautiful. The decorations which are made upon 
primitive pottery exhibit the excess vitality and skill of the virtuoso. 
Similarly, religious ritual, which, as we have seen, arises in practical 
commerce with the gods, comes to be in itself cherished and beautiful. 
The chants which are prescribed invocations of divinity, become songs 
intrinsically interesting to singer and listener alike; the dance ceases to 


1Jn this I have in mind the accepted list of fine arts. But there are certain 
forms of art, if we may so call them, that are widely cultivated now, which have 
both a moral and a social influence in the highest possible degree, such, for in- 
stance, as popular music, the modern dance, the moving pictures. Concerning 
the moral influence of these more or less degraded forms of art I cannot speak 
here; but the socializing power of them is certainly very great. The modern 
automobile has a degree of beauty as well as efficiency, and has a socializing in- 
fluence of unknown power, a universal theme for conversation, and a means of 
social intercourse. At the risk of shocking the cultured reader, I might even refer 
to a certain artistic effect of the bright and attractive filling stations that have 
sprung up in every city, town, and village throughout the land, replacing many 
an unsightly edifice. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 435 


be merely a necessary religious form and becomes an occasion of beauty 
and delight. ... Repeatedly we find in primitive life that activity is 
not exhausted in agriculture, hunting, and handicraft, or in a desperate 
commerce with divinity. Harvest becomes a festival, pottery becomes 
an opportunity for decoration, and prayer, for poetry. Even in primi- 
tive life men find the leisure to let their imaginations loiter over these 
intrinsically lovely episodes in their experience.! 


The imagination supreme 

Finally it is in the imaginative work of the artist that the crea- 
tive power of the human mind attains its perfection. In a pre- 
ceding chapter we have compared the creative agency which is at 
work in evolution to an artist ‘‘with inexhaustible resources of 
imagination.”’ Whatever this agency is, its supreme achieve- 
ment is the human mind — an achievement supreme because 
the mind itself is creative of still higher values, and this power is 
seen at its best In imaginative work in the fine arts, where even 
the beauties of nature are surpassed. In the study of ethical 
- values we have seen how that marvelous power which we call 
rational thought has discovered higher and ever higher standards 
of conduct; but in all such creative work of thought, as also n 
scientific discovery and in mechanical invention, the imagination 
is an active factor. Sometimes we speak of it as insight or vision. 
Whatever we call it, imagination is supreme in the work of the 
artist, where it seems like inspiration. 

I have spoken of the art impulse as if it belonged only to the 
artist. But both the art impulse and the creative power of 
thought and imagination are common to all minds, differing 
only in degree. Most of us have at some time tried our hands 
at poetry, or modeling in clay or artistic designing, drawing, or 
painting; while the creative imagination is manifest, even in 
day-dreaming or in telling stories or in the writing of fiction. 
When these powers common to all are most highly developed and 
accompanied by a high degree of technical skill, we have genius ; 
then appears the great poet, painter, sculptor, architect, or 
musical composer. 


1 Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance (Houghton Mifflin 
Company), pp. 333, 334. 


436 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


II. Theories of the Beautiful 


Art from the observer’s standpoint 

We have tried to see just what art is from the standpoint of 
the artist, the creator of an object of beauty. We must now 
inquire what it is from the standpoint of the beholder. What 
sort of experience is zesthetic experience? The obvious answer 
is that it is the sort of experience which we have in the contem- 
plation of beauty of any kind, in nature or in art. So the final 
question comes, What is beauty? — and it is this part of the 
zesthetic problem which has been so much discussed and which 
has led to so many different answers. We know what beauty 
is until we are asked. Then we do not know. 

The older theories of beauty were metaphysical, in contrast 
with our modern theories, which are psychological. The meta- 
physical theories considered beauty as something real and ob- 
jective — perhaps a kind of essence or entity, or at least some 
objective aspect or quality of things. The ancient Greeks hardly 
thought of explaining beauty as a certain kind of feeling existing 
only in the mind of the beholder. 


Historical 

Plato in certain of his Dialogues seems to hold a peculiarly 
metaphysical theory of beauty, as if it were a reality in itself, 
a kind of eternal and unchanging essence or “form,” any indi- 
vidual beautiful object being said to participate in this essential 
beauty. When in other places he speaks of harmony, propor- 
tion, and symmetry as constituting beauty, he still thinks of 
them metaphysically as objective qualities of things. 


For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth 
to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, 
to love one such form only — out of that he should create fair thoughts; 
and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin 
to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his 
pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in 
every form is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will 
abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small 
thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 437 


he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than 
the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous soul have but a 
little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search 
out and bring to the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until 
he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and 
laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and 
that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go 
on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant 
in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a 
slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplat- 
ing the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts 
and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows 
and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single 
science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. ... 

He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has 
learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes 
toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and 
this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils) — a nature which 
in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and 
waning;... but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, 
which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is im- 
parted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. 
He who, from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to 
perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of 
going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the 
beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, 
using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two 
to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair 
practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion 
of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. 
“This, my dear Socrates,” said the stranger of Mantineia, “is that life 
above all others which men should live, in the contemplation of beauty 
absolute, . . . the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, 
not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vani- 
ties of human life — thither looking, and holding converse with the true 
beauty simple and divine.” Remember how in that communion only, 
beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring 
forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image 
but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to be- 
come the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.} 


A still more spiritual theory of beauty was held by Plotinus, 
the Neo-Platonist (205-70 a.p.), who thought that beauty is 


1Plato, The Symposium. Trans. by Jowett (Oxford University Press). 


438 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the pure effulgence of the divine Reason. When the Absolute 
expresses itself or shines forth in its full pristine reality, it is 
beauty. The artist is the “seer,’’ who can see the divine beauty. 

Hegel’s theory is an instance of a more modern metaphysical 
view. All nature is a manifestation of the Absolute Idea. 
Beauty is the Absolute Idea shining through some sensuous 
medium. It is a kind of disclosure of spirit. Art, religion, and 
philosophy are for Hegel the highest stages in the development 
of spirit. 

The art-products of the world register the insight of the human race 
into Beauty, and the nations of the world have left their profoundest in- 
tuitions and ideas thus embodied. Art gives to phenomenal appearances 
“a reality that is born of mind”; and through Art they become, not 


semblances, but higher realities. It is thus that Art breaks, as it were, 
through the shell, and gets out the kernel for us. 


Schopenhauer’s Theory of Beauty, also metaphysical, is very 
striking. The Absolute Will, which is reality, objectifies itself 
directly in the Platonic Ideas, or, as we should say, in the idea, 
type, species, genus, and indirectly in individual things. Any- 
thing is beautiful in proportion as it realizes or approximates to 
the type. In moments of pure contemplation, when we put 
aside all desire and deny the ‘‘will-to-live,”’ we are able to see 
this ideal beauty. The common man is two thirds will and 
desire, and one third intellect; the artist is two thirds intellect 
and one third will; and hence is able to see through the outer 
husk of things to the ideal beauty lying back of phenomena. It 
is the artist, therefore, rather than the scientist, who knows 
reality. The artist ceases to ask about the “why” and “when” 
and ‘“‘where”’ of things, and regards only the ‘‘what.’”’ That art 
is the lowest which is most encumbered with matter. This is 
architecture. Then comes sculpture and painting and poetry, 
and finally music, the highest of the fine arts, in which there is 
an immediate objectification of the Absolute. The composer 
reveals the inner nature of the world, and expresses the deepest 
wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand.” 


1 William Knight, The Philosophy of the Beautiful, part 1, p. 71, discussing 
Hegel. 
? Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1, p. 336. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 439 


Another type of metaphysical theory is that of Ruskin, who 
believed that beauty in objects is found in certain qualities, such 
as unity, repose, symmetry, purity, and moderation, which typ- 
ify divine attributes. 

A recent subjectivistic metaphysical theory is that of the 
Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, who says that beauty is 
wholly mental, not belonging to physical objects. A%sthetic 
creation is the mind’s most primitive and elemental form of ac- 
tivity. Croce calls it “expression”; but by this he does not 
mean the translation of a mental concept into some outer phy- 
sicalform. Aisthetic activity is a spiritual act, by which we con- 
vert mere impressions into intuitions. It is pure intuition. 

An entirely new direction was given to esthetic inquiry by 
Kant, whose penetrating mind seemed to get at the heart of 
so many philosophical problems. Kant represents the beginning 
of the modern scientific and psychological study of sxsthetic 
theory. In his third great critique, The Critique of Judgment, 
Kant says that the mind has a third faculty beyond that of the 
reason and the will, namely, that of feeling. The peculiar char- 
acteristic of esthetic feeling or zesthetic pleasure is that it is dzs- 
interested. This marks it off from all other pleasures, which have 
an element of desire, involving personal or vital interests. Sugar, 
for instance, is not beautiful; it is agreeable. We have to possess 
it in order to enjoy it. Likewise a moral act is not beautiful; it 
is good. We approve of it and therefore have an interest in it. 
The beautiful, on the other hand, is always the object of disinter- 
ested satisfaction, separate from all desire. Beauty, however, 
although it is mental, is objective, since it is always the object of 
a judgment, in which we say, “‘ This thing is beautiful,” thus re- 
garding beauty as a quality of objects, not a merely subjective 
taste. 


The play theory of art 
‘We have seen above, in studying the art impulse, how the 
creative activity of the artist has been likened to play. But the 


1 See Benedetto Croce, #sthetic. Trans. by Douglas Ainslie. See H. Wildon 
Carr, The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, chaps. 111 and Ix. ; 


440 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


play theory applies equally well to the beholder, and has proved 
to be a valuable help in understanding esthetic pleasure. A 
suggestion made by Kant and followed up by the poet Schiller 
was later developed by Herbert Spencer 1 into the so-called Spzel- 
trieb, or play-impulse theory. The word play may be applied to 
all those human activities which are free and spontaneous and 
pursued for their own sake alone. The interest in them is self- 
developing and they are not continued under any internal or ex- 
ternal compulsion. The word work on the other hand, includes 
all those activities in which by means of sustained voluntary 
attention one holds one’s self down to a given task for the sake 
of some end to be attained other than the activity itself. Work 
involves mental stress, strain, effort, tension, and concentration. 
Play, being the spontaneous expression of vitality itself, in- 
volves none of these, but is pleasurable in a high degree. Now, 
when this playlike activity involves the two higher senses, sight 
and hearing, and our higher mental powers and even our emo- 
tions, says Spencer, the conditions are fulfilled for the acquire- 
ment of zesthetic pleasure, which arises in the use of overflowing 
and surplus energy. “The esthetic excitement is one arising 
when there is an exercise of certain faculties for its own sake 
apart from ulterior benefits.” 

In the contemplation of beauty, therefore, in its many forms, 
the eye and the ear and the mind are at play, and the accom- 
panying pleasure is esthetic. To take a single example, the 
perception of unity in variety is one of the most constant of men- 
tal functions, daily exercised in real life. When, now, this func- 
tion is performed for the mere love of it with no serious end, the 
affective tone accompanying it is of the esthetic kind. Thus, 
unity in variety is found in every work of art, be it a musical 
composition, painting, statue, or poetic masterpiece. We all love 
to see unity in variety, particularly to discover it. It satisfies 
and rests us, bringing to the mind what some one has called a 
kind of “‘domestic peace.” In a musical composition a peculiar 
pleasure follows the discovery of a recurrent theme, lending a 
unity to what first seemed a mere diversity. 

1 Principles of Psychology, vol. 11, part rx, chap. rx. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 441 


It has even been suggested that the pleasure which we find in 
elementary colors and tones and in tone and color harmonies 
may be likewise explained by the play theory. We greatly enjoy 
bright colors, such as red, orange, and yellow, in the sunset, 
rainbow, cultivated flowers, and autumn leaves, as well as in 
painting, decoration, and dress. The eye delights to use its 
sensory powers, merely for the sake of using them, and, as Grant 
Allen has suggested, surrounded as we are with grays and greens 
and blues, from street and lawn and sky, the eye revels in the 
enjoyment of the brighter colors when opportunity offers. The 
play theory of esthetic pleasure is again illustrated in the dance, 
when harmonious and balanced movements provide the needed 
exercise to the overnourished and underworked muscles and 
motor centers of the body, while the ‘‘realized expectation” of 
the rhythm and the music add to the esthetic joy. 

The play theory of art has withstood adverse criticism fairly 
well since the time of Schiller and Spencer. We now know that 
play is not so much the overflow of surplus and unexpended 
energy as it is that outflowing of energy which is the expression 
of life itself. But this revision of Spencer’s theory strengthens 
rather than weakens its force as applied to art production and 
zesthetic pleasure. Art is not a kind of child’s play or pastime 
for idle moments, any more than play is a kind of activity lefé 
over after one’s work is done. | 

Our modern industrial society has given us an exaggerated 
notion of the relative importance of work in life as a whole, so 
‘much so that certain social reformers have proposed the absurd 
theory that only industrial workers should be entitled to citizen- 
ship. The child does not play because ‘‘surplus’”’ energy needs 
to be expended; he plays because he is a child and play is his 
spontaneous activity.! So the natural life of a man is not work 
in the sense of drudgery, but some kind of spontaneous creative 
activity in which, to be sure, he produces something. He may 
produce something useful, in which case we call his activity work, 
or he may produce something beautiful, when we callit art. The 


1See the author’s Psychology of Relaxation (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
chap. 11, ‘‘The Psychology of Play.” 


442 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


latter is equally with work a part of real life, but in freedom 
and spontaneity it resembles play. 


Empathy 

The word empathy has been used to denote the sympathetic 
motor attitudes which the observer assumes in the presence of 
objects of beauty. This word was suggested by Titchener for 
the German word Hinfiihlung, used by Theodor Lipps, who 
writing at the beginning of the century first gave currency to the 
Hinfihlung theory. A clear account of this theory may be 
found in Langfeld’s book, The Aisthetic Attitude. He says: 


When we listen to a song, we have a tendency to move in time to the 
rhythm, and to repeat the notes with accompanying tension in the 
throat. In silent reading, the tendency to movement often goes over 
into actual movement of the lips or muscles of the larynx. The act of 
unity itself, fundamental to experience, is conceived in motor terms as 
a bringing of things together. It will rightly be objected that in many 
instances of perception there is no consciousness of such movement, not 
even of the faintest tendency toward such imitation of facial expression 
as that just described. The answer is that these motor sets may be, 
and in fact most frequently are, subconscious. The object observed, 
whether through the eye, ear, or another of the senses, arouses the mem- 
ory of former movements, which are so revived that they form a nervous 
pattern; that is, the nerve paths going to the necessary muscle groups 
are opened, and those to opposed muscle groups are closed, and this 
pattern, which is ready on additional stimulation to produce actual 
movement, is sufficient to give us our perception of space, weight, form, 
smoothness, delicacy, and many of our other experiences. Accordingly 
one must for the most part explain this tendency to movement in physi- 
ological rather than psychological terms.! 


Almost any one may become conscious of these motor atti- 
tudes by thinking vividly of a man rowing a boat, or dancers 
gliding about a room, or an automobile skidding around a corner. 
As you think of these movements, you can feel your own tenden- 
cies to move in your arms, trunk, or legs. But now these same 
motor attitudes are assumed, not only in mental imagery, but in 
perception, and in the perception, not only of moving objects 


1 Herbert Sidney Langfeld, The Aisthetic Attitude (Harcourt, Brace and Com- 
pany), pp. 110, 111. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 443 


like dancers, but of buildings, statues, and paintings, and even 
of music. In esthetic contemplation we are wholly unconscious 
of these movements, so that they become for us, not subjective 
phenomena at all, but qualities of the beautiful object. We can- 
not say that they are “projected” into the object; they are sim- 
ply felt to be there; they belong to the object, and at once glorify 
it with all the rich meaning of our own former experiences. The 
thing becomes beautiful because it is clothed with a meaning 
drawn from our own active life; the object is vitalized. For 
instance, a Doric column of a Greek temple gets its meaning and 
its beauty partly from the unconscious motor set of our own 
organism as we have the tendency firmly to brace our feet as if 
to support a great weight. The pleasure in the experience seems 
to consist in the successful balance of forces and is interpreted 
as the quality of beauty in the object. 

It would seem that the Theory of Empathy is a valuable con- 
tribution to our understanding of the philosophy of art. It 
- seems clear that in the contemplation of a work of art, these 
motor tendencies are, indeed, present, and that they add to our 
understanding and appreciation of the object of beauty. They 
give it a strange life and vitality. But Empathy alone would 
seem to furnish a philosophy of appreciation rather than a phil- 
osophy of esthetic pleasure. The source of pleasure in the 
empathetic experience is not quite apparent. 

There is, however, one aspect of the Theory of Empathy 
which is important. We remember that in speaking of the art 
impulse we found that the primary motive of the artist is to 
widen and intensify his experience by sharing it with all man- 
kind. He desires a social response to his own emotion or great 
thought. Certainly this is attained in the highest degree if the 
observer goes through with him empathetically his very motions 
as he worked upon his art production. Sympathy could go no 
further than this. The Theory of Empathy may thus in part 
explain that peculiar and essential social solidarity which it is 
the function of all art to promote. 

The element of repose and unity in harmonious functioning 
has been emphasized by Ethel D. Puffer in her admirable book, 


444 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


The Psychology of Beauty, ‘The beautiful object possesses those 
qualities which bring the personality into a state of unity and 
self-completeness.”’ She says: 


A thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the esthetic experience in 
its simplest and most sensuous form has given us a principle — the prin- 
ciple of unity in harmonious functioning — which has enabled us to 
follow the track of beauty into the more complex realms of ideas and of 
moral attitudes, and to discover that there also the law of internal rela- 
tion and of fitness for imitative response holds for all embodiments of 
beauty. That harmonious, imitative response, the psychophysical state 
known on its feeling side as esthetic pleasure, we have seen to be, first, 
a kind of physiological equilibrium, a “coexistence of opposing impulses 
which heightens the sense of being while it prevents action,” like the im- 
pulses to movement corresponding to geometrical symmetry; secondly, 
a psychological equilibrium, in which the flow of ideas and impulses is a 
circle rounding upon itself, all associations, emotions, expectations in- 
dissolubly linked with the central thought and leading back only to it, 
and proceeding in an irrevocable order, which is yet adapted to the pos- 
sibilities of human experience; and thirdly, a quietude of the will in the 
acceptance of the given moral attitude for the whole scheme of life. 
Thus is given, in the fusion of these three orders of mental life, the per- 
fect. movement of unity and self-completeness.! 


III. The Zisthetic Experience 


Psychological aspects 

While, perhaps, we cannot yet say that a science of the 
beautiful has replaced the older “theories,” I think we may be 
greatly encouraged by the progress that has been made in un- 
raveling the skein of puzzles which formerly comprised the 
“problem” of beauty. Beauty is a name that we give to certain 
qualities of objects by virtue of which they give rise in us to cer- 
tain peculiar pleasures which we call esthetic. Such pleasures 
are disinterested, universal, and permanently pleasurable, even 
in revival in memory.? In speaking of esthetic pleasures as uni- 
versal, we mean nothing more than that they are objectified, 
thought of not at all as agreeable feelings of our own, but as qual- 


1 Ethel D. Puffer, The Psychology of Beauty (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
p. 285, 286. 
2 Compare Marshall’s 4sthetic Principles, chaps. 1 and 1. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 445 


ities of objects which would give pleasure to all. In esthetic 
contemplation the self is forgotten. There is a kind of absorp- 
tion in the beautiful object, a feeling of complete unity, freedom, 
and completeness.! 

Under what conditions, then, do those pleasures which are per- 
manent, universal, and disinterested arise In the human mind. 
Pleasure, as we remember, is the affective tone which accom- 
panies mental and physiological processes when they are normal 
and healthy, when life is at full tide, when all goes well, and the 
vital strivings of the individual are being realized. When we 
were studying the mind in a former chapter, we discovered that 
the elementary things in our soul life are profound impulses 
or desires, conations, as we call them — perhaps the will-to-live. 
In his striving after life, full and free, the individual finds the 
environment sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile. To its 
friendly contacts nature has added something which we call 
pleasure — a new and wonderful value. 

It is evident, then, that the conditions under which those 
peculiar, permanent, universal, and disinterested pleasures, 
which we call esthetic, arise, are those in which there is a com- 
plete harmony between the individual and his environment. 
The situation will then be one of perfect adjustment of the in- 
dividual to his surroundings. There will be a feeling of unity 
and repose, and this will come only after all material wants 
have been satisfied, in moments of pure spontaneity, when some 
part of the personality is at play and its pleasures are wholly 
disinterested. 

Thus we see that beauty is not anything belonging to objects 
in themselves apart from the perceiving subject; neither is it 
anything which belongs alone to the subject; it depends upon 
the relation of the object perceived to the perceiving organism, 
and the relation is of the kind which we may characterize as 
a harmony and adjustment brought about by the fact that there 
is something in the object which calls into play the harmonious 


1 See the short, clear account in the article entitled ‘‘The True, the Good, and 
the Beautiful from a Pragmatic Standpoint,” by Montague, in the Jour. of Phil., 
Psych., and Sci. Meth., vol. vi, p. 233. 


446 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


and restful functioning of mind and body under circumstances 
free from selfish or personally interested motives. As Kallen 
says: 


The object, when apprehended, awakens the active functioning of the 
whole organism directly and harmoniously with itself, cuts it off from 
the surrounding world, shuts that world out for the time being, and 
forms a complete, harmonious, and self-sufficient system, peculiar and 
unique in the fact that there is no passing from this deed into further 
adaptation with the object. Struggle and aliency are at end, and what- 
ever activity now goes on feels self-conserving, spontaneous, free. The 
need of readjustment has disappeared, and with it the feeling of strain, 
obstruction, and resistance, which is its sign. There is nothing but the 
object, and that is possessed completely, satisfying, and as if forever. 
Art, in a word, supplies an environment from which strife, foreignness, 
obstruction, and death are eliminated. It actualizes unity, spirituality, 
and eternity in the environment; it frees and enhances the life of the self. 
To the environment which art successfully creates, the mind finds itself. 
completely and harmoniously adapted by the initial act of perception. 

In the world of art, value and existence are one.! 


Let us see whether these principles could be applied con- 
cretely to the work of the artist. We recall that the aim of 
the artist is to attract by pleasing. In its very simplest form 
perhaps it is nothing more than an impulse to expend in the 
regular practice of some mechanic art, perhaps in the making of 
a basket or an earthen pot or a bow and arrow, a little of the 
artisan’s abounding energy in making it not only useful, but 
attractive. He will embellish his product, and becomes thereby 
the artist. 

Now, the artist perhaps knows little of psychology or physiol- 
ogy, and possibly does not reason about the sources of human 
pleasure; he proceeds quite instinctively and empirically. But 
it 1s as uf he had a keen insight into the motor mechanism of the 
human subject, the structure and functioning of the organs of 
sense and the inner working of the mind, and thus knew how to 
fashion his work of art in such a way as to bring about in the 
beholder that peculiar absorption, detachment, and “distance,” 


1 Horace M. Kallen. “ Value and Existence in Philosophy, Art, and Religion,” 
in Creative Intelligence (Henry Holt and Company), p. 439. 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 447 


that state of unity in repose, that self-conserving, spontaneous, 
and harmonious functioning of the whole organism which con- 
stitutes esthetic experience. Itis as if he knew how to play upon 
the mind and motor mechanism of the human subject in such a 
way as to cause precisely those permanent, disinterested, and 
universal pleasures which we call esthetic. 

The artist seems to do all this intuitively. His knowledge, if 
not instinctive, is at any rate empirical. He has discovered first 
that he may gain the end in view by the use of brighé colors or pure 
colors and color harmonies, by pure tones and tone harmonies, and 
by cadence, rhyme, and rhythm. With the results of his discovery 
of rhythm, he would be particularly well pleased, for he would 
find that in the dance and in music and poetry it would exercise 
a fascination that no one could resist. 

As he proceeded to more elaborate works of art, he would find 
that unity in variety would be a never-failing source of pleasure, 
as well as symmetry and proportion. He would discover that 
there are certain forms and certain lines and curves that are 
universally pleasing. He would find that in painting and sculp- 
ture the representation of familiar objects in nature, particularly 
animal bodies and the human form and face, yields the kind 
of pleasure that he seeks. In poetry he would learn how his 
hearers are charmed by the narration in metric form of scenes 
and events from their own lives — their lives of war and love and 
even of industry, with all the joyous parts extolled and all the 
hardships forgotten. 

Finally he would see that, in depicting scenes of natural beauty 
and animal and human forms and human faces, the greatest 
pleasure arises, not from a slavish imitation of nature, but 
by a kind of “representation,”’ in which the imagination of the 
beholder has a part to play, or even by a kind of idealiza- 
tion, in which the essential and significant elements are intensi- 
fied, or perhaps delicately exaggerated. Thus the genius of the 
artist puts upon canvas a sunset more exquisite than any actual 
sunset, or paints a Madonna more beautiful than any actual face 
of woman. Now, the psychologist or the philosopher in reflect- 
ing upon all this is able to explain to some extent the causes of 


448 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the peculiar pleasure awakened in each of these several ways. 
Some of these explanations have been indicated in this chapter; 
some are still to seek. 


Resumé 

Summarizing in the briefest way what we have learned, we 
may say that art is a social phenomenon springing from the crea- 
tive impulse in the mind of the artist, an impulse to give expres- 
sion in creative form to some profound emotion or great thought, 
which he wishes to share with other members of his group or 
with all mankind. And instinctively he grasps the means of 
making his fellow men his sharers. He appeals directly to their 
love of color, to their love of harmony, to their love of unity and 
proportion. He appeals to the play impulse, to the joy of har- 
monious functioning of every organ and every faculty. He 
appeals to the deep need which every man feels for moments of 
repose, of rest from his eternal striving, the need for intervals of 
perfect adjustment in a life of restless striving for an adjustment 
which striving never brings. The artist comes to the beholder 
with a gift — the gift of repose and harmony and a feeling of 
unity and completeness. Such an experience as this is wsthetie 
experience. It gives esthetic pleasure, which we should better 
call esthetic joy. And to the object of contemplation the beholder 
ascribes a quality which he calls beauty. Therefore works of art, 
which call forth these sentiments, are beautiful. Objects of 
nature may also arouse these wsthetic feelings. Shall we say in 
this case that Nature is the artist, impelled likewise by an art 
impulse, aspiring to self-completion in both beauty and its appre- 
ciation? Is Nature, too, trying to express herself, to express 
ever some great thought or feeling, aiming to bring into being 
works of beauty and also enjoyment of them? This latter ques- 
tion we cannot answer, but in esthetic contemplation we know 
that a peculiar unity and sympathy arise between Nature and 
man. 

This is an imperfect summary of our imperfect knowledge of 
the esthetic experience. But it may be useful as an approach, 
to further study of this engaging theme. Particularly in music 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 449 


has it proved difficult to formulate the psychological grounds of 
its strange emotional effects. 


The mystery of music 

Even if the esthetics of harmony, melody, and rhythm could 
be understood, there is still a deep unexplained residue of xs- 
thetic pleasure in music. One subject which awaits experi- 
mental inquiry is the question to what extent the “mystical” 
overtones and their varied combinations may awaken forgotten 
memories, racial or individual, of emotions engendered in social 
intercourse through the human voice, dimly suggesting distant 
scenes of love or war or social enterprise. 

Psychological explanations of the esthetics of music failing, 
many metaphysical ones have been suggested. Some have 
thought that through the medium of the ear we are in more im- 
mediate communication with the very heart of reality than 
through the eye, which limits us to surface phenomena only. 
_ Music, said Schopenhauer, is entirely independent of the phenom- 
enal world, ignores it altogether, and could in a sense exist if 
there were no world at all. Thus music is a universal language, 
intuitively understood, and loses some of its inner meaning when 
accompanied by words. The world is ‘‘embodied music’”’: 


The unutterable depth of ail music by virtue of which it floats through 
our consciousness as the vision of a paradise firmly believed in yet ever 
distant from us, and by which also it is so fully understood and yet so 
inexplicable, rests on the fact that it restores to us all the emotions of our 
inmost nature, but entirely without reality and far removed from their 
pain.? 


Beauty as ideal value 

There is still another puzzling question which should be men- 
tioned. Since we speak now not so much of beauty as of zesthetic 
pleasure, the whole treatment seems too psychological, too sub- 


1 The almost intoxicating effects of rhythm have been partly explained. See 
the instructive article by Carl E. Seashore entitled ‘‘The Sense of Rhythm as 
a Musical Talent,’ in The Musical Quarterly, vol. Iv, no. 4, pp. 507-15, 

2 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea. Trans. by R. B. Haldane and 


J. Kemp, vol. 1, p. 341. 


450 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


jective. Is there, then, no beauty in itself? Was Plato wholly 
wrong? Were not the wild flowers, which blossomed on the 
prairies ages before the advent of man, beautiful before the eye 
came to see and appreciate them? Did the rainbow just begin 
to acquire beauty when the first man saw it? 

Again, if beauty is subjective, depending upon the awakening 
of certain peculiar kinds of pleasure, then it would appear that 
any object will be beautiful in proportion as it awakens pleasure 
of this kind. But this seems to be inconsistent with the fact 
that good taste in art is the result of education and a cultured 
environment. If a person does not enjoy good music (that is, 
music which appears to us to be ‘‘good”’), or if he cannot appre- 
ciate the work of the great masters (that is, masters who are com- 
monly reputed to be great), we say that he has poor taste, assum- 
ing that there is some norm or standard of beauty which this 
person cannot appreciate. Chandler in a recent article! at- 
tempts to meet this difficulty by saying that the standard of 
beauty is found in the judgment of those of richly developed 
experience; but this seems to imply some goal toward which 
the development is tending. 

Perhaps this difficulty may be met if we consider that beauty 
is after all a value, let us say an ultimate value — or even, if you 
choose, an “eternal value” to be realized through a process of 
evolution. The notion of beauty arises only in a total situation 
representing a relation between certain qualities of objects, such 
as colors, tones, symmetry, unity, proportion, on the one hand, 
and on the other, a highly developed and exceedingly complex 
human organism with a mind in which has developed the capac- 
ity of entering into peculiar relations with those qualities and ex- 
tracting therefrom a peculiar joy, which we call esthetic pleasure. 
Beauty, then, would be a new value attained through creative 
evolution; an end, if you please, for which all the separate factors 
in the total situation are indispensable. 

If we accept this view that beauty is a value, and, together 
with moral good, perhaps the highest value that we know, there 


1 Albert R. Chandler, ‘‘The Nature of Esthetic Objectivity,” Jour. of Phil., 
Psych., and Sci. Meth., vol, xvii, p. 632. x 


THE HIGHER VALUES OF LIFE 451 


would be, I think, three ways of interpreting this highly idealistic 
theory. We might consider these moral and xsthetic values as 
“novelties,” but novelties of supreme worth, which in the age- 
long progress of evolution have finally appeared. They were 
not foreseen by any mind, human or divine, nor planned, nor 
desired, nor willed. But they are here, and they are good; and 
it is not impossible that other still higher values may be forth- 
coming in the future. This method of interpretation would be, 
I suppose, dear to the heart of the Pragmatist, and it is a view 
that must certainly make a deep appeal. 

A second view would regard moral and esthetic values as 
ends toward which Nature has been consciously striving. They 
have been willed, foreseen, envisaged by some cosmic mind or 
will of God. They are ‘‘ideas,”’ as well as ideals. Such a view 
would be welcomed by all schools of personal or theistic Ideal- 
ism, and is again a view appealing with great power to many 
of us. 

A third theory would regard these moral and esthetic values 
as the product of a creative evolution which is in the nature of a 
process of realization, beauty being one of the values to be real- 
ized. Beauty, then, like justice, and others of the “eternal 
values,’ would be an end in itself, which has actually been a 
factor in determining the means of its realization, the various 
steps in the evolutionary program being zndzspensable to this end, 
and a certain control over the whole world movement being exer- 
cised by the values themselves. We should then have to think of 
the world, not as a series of events in a time order in which ante- 
cedents alone were causes — a convenient notation for our work 
in the physical sciences — but as a process of realization, in 
which events in the time series would be regarded as indis- 
pensable conditions for the realization of the ideal values. In 
this manner of thinking, God as the totality of values would 
again be the creator of the world, but rather as an alluring than 
as an efficient cause. Such a view would be both idealistic 
and teleological; but the latter term would be used in a sense 
somewhat different from its older meaning. In Santayana’s 
words, ‘‘the whole of natural life, then, is an aspiration after 


452 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 


the realization and vision of Ideas, and all action is for the 
sake of contemplation.” 


In connection with this chapter read: 
Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance (Houghton 
Mifflin Company), chap. x11. 


Further references: 
Ethel D. Puffer, The Psychology of Beauty. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 


Herbert Sidney Langfeld, The Aisthetic Attitude. (Harcourt, Brace and 
Company.) 

G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life (Methuen and Company), 
chap. tv, ‘The Greek View of Art.” 


George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) 

H. H. Powers, The Message of Greek Art. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Yrj6 Hirn, The Origins of Art. (The Macmillan Company.) 

Edward Howard Griggs, The Philosophy of Art. (B. W. Huebsch.) 

Henry Rutgers Marshall. Asthetic Principles. (The Macmillan Com- 
pany.) 

Irving Babbitt, The New Laocoon. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 


William Knight, The Philosophy of the Beautiful. Two parts. (Charles 
Scribner’s Sons.) 


Arthur Schopenhauer, Selected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, by E. B. 
Bax (George Bell and Sons), ‘On the Metaphysics of the Beautiful 
and on Aisthetics,”’ pp. 274-318. 


Aristotle, The Poetics. 
Kate Gordon, Esthetics. (Henry Holt and Company.) 
EK. F. Carritt, The Theory of Beauty. (The Macmillan Company.) 


DeWitt Henry Parker, The Principles of Histhetics. (Silver, Burdett, 
and Company.) 
Hugo Miunsterberg, The Hternal Values. (Houghton Mifflin Company.) 


INDEX 


Absolute, the, 172, 175, 181, 255, 390. 

Achievement, life and mind as, 140-42, 
163-64, 307. 

Acquired characters, inheritance of, 
112-15, 117. 

Adams, George P., 12, 180, 249, 253, 
354. 

Adaptation, 146-47, 150-52. 

Adrenal glands, 120-21. 

feschylus, 7. 

Aisthetic experience, 4380, 444-49. 

Austhetic pleasure, 426-28, 486-49. 

Zusthetic values, 426-52. 

Zusthetics, 7, 58; problem of, 426-52. 

Agnosticism, 39-40, 169. 

Ahriman, 210, 215. 

Alexander, S., 12, 66, 69, 70, 74, 197, 
310, 322, 326, 342, 367, 369, 373, 425. 

Aliotta, A., 12, 253. 

Allen, Grant, 182, 441. 

' Altruism, 138. 

Ames, E. S., 32. 

Analysis of concepts, 16, 17-26, 50-51. 

Anaxagoras, 98, 147, 211. 

Angell, James Rowland, 341. 

Animism, 19, 212, 271-72. 

Anthropomorphism, 19, 134-35, 170, 
185. 

Ants and bees, do they have duties, 
402-03. 

Appetency, 81, 118. 

Apriorism, 347, 349. 

Aristippus, 409. 

Aristophanes, 7. 

Aristotle, 9, 37, 40, 53, 62, 78, 91, 92, 
96, 98, 111, 148, 149, 154, 156, 163, 
175, 226, 298, 322, 323; his theory 
of the soul, 267; his theory of morals, 
412. 

Arnold, Edwin, 198. 

Arnold, Matthew, 1, 35, 98, 199, 400. 

Arrhenius, Svante, 76. 

Art, 248; and morals, 432, 433; origins 
of, 426, 434; periods in bistory, 
428-30; the art impulse, 429-36; 
the decline of art, 428-29. See also 
Adsthetics. 

Artist, evolution as the work of an 
artist, 134, 156. 


Arts, mechanic, 41; industrial, 430. 

Aspiration, 292. 

Astronomy, 60-61. 

Atom, 224, 227-37; as created thing, 
231; energy locked up in, 230-31; 
utilization of energy of, 230—31. 

Atomism, 218, 227-32. 

Atomists, Greek, 220. 

Atoms of action, 235. 

Augustine, Saint, 40, 211, 226, 267. 

Automobile, socializing influence of, 
434. 

Awareness, 310-13, 324, 325. 


Babbitt, Irving, 139, 452. 

Bacon, Francis, 10, 30, 46, 53, 149, 167. 

Bakewell, C. M., 12. 

Balfour, Lord Arthur J., 168, 182, 186, 
Dol, 

Barton, G. A., 35. 

Bateson, William, 130, 132, 133, 135. 

Bawden, H. Heath, 382, 384. 

Beautiful, the. See Art and Aisthetics. 

Beauty, problem of, 426—52; theories of, 
436-44. See also Aisthetics. 

Beethoven, 428. 

Behavior, 276, 294-95, 296-97. 

Behaviorism, 274, 275, 277; behavior- 
istic theory of mind, 277-80. 

Bentham, Jeremy, 410. 

Bergson, Henri, 11, 44-45, 52, 90, 91, 
93, 97, 100-01, 103, 131, 181, 272, 
286, 291, 322, 326, 343; his theory of 
time, 70-71; his view of freedom, 
337-39. 

Berkeley, George, 12, 175, 226, 246; his 
idealism, 241-42; his subjectivism, 
356-63. 

Berman, Louis, 289. 

Betelgeuse, 60. 

Bible, 31, 198, 200. 

Biological Interests, 288-93, 325-26. 

Biology, 78, 82-84, 91-93, 98-100, 123, 
153-55. 

Bird, T. Malcolm, 74. 

Blake, William, 181. 

Bode, Boyd H., 281, 316, 377. 

Body and Mind, 317-26. See also 
Mind, Dualism, Materialism. 


ADA 


Boehme, Jacob, 44. 

Bois-Reymond, Emile du, 317. 

Boodin, John E., 12, 142, 165, 233, 313. 

Bosanquet, Bernard, 23, 160, 164, 166, 
249, 252, 316, 342: 

Boutroux, Emile, 35, 90, 340. 

Bowne, Borden P., 12, 249, 250. 

Bradley, F. H., 175, 249, 272. 

Briffault, Robert, 207. 

Brill, A. A., 284. 

Broad, C. D., 11, 16, 26, 66, 74, 373. 

Brock, A. Clutton, 428. 

Brown, Harold C., 377. 

Brown, W. A., 11. 

Browning, Robert, 7-8, 39, 168, 181, 
188, 197, 225. 

Bruno, 98, 149. 

Buddhism, 198. 

Burbank, Luther, 25. 

Burroughs, John, 99, 103, 121, 128, 129. 

Bush, W. T., 12, 310. 

Bussey, Gertrude Carman, 335, 337, 
343. 

Butler, Samuel, 244. 

Byron, 8, 199. 


Cabot, Dr., Richard Clarke, 173. 

Caird, Edward, 249. 

Calkins, Mary Whiton, 11, 249, 262, 
269, 286. 

Cannon, Walter B., 120, 121. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 194, 196, 245. 

Carr, H. Wildon, 69, 74, 291, 338, 439. 

Carritt, E. F., 452. 

Catharsis, 194. 

Caullery, M., 123, 127, 131. 

Causality, 18, 331. 

Causation, theories of, 19-20. 

Cause, as enforcement, 18-20; discus- 
sion of, 18; final, 19-20, 143-66; in 
science, 18. 

Chamberlain, T. C., 73. 

Chance, 336. 

Chandler, Albert R., 450. 

Character, 187; moral, 406, 413-20; 
character values, 214-20. 

Chesterton, G. K., 188. 

Christianity, 31, 175. 

Christian Scientists, 171. 

Civilization, at the cross-roads, 34. 

Cleveland, Grover, 374. 

Clifford, W. K., 237, 244, 272. 

Coe, G. A., 180. 

Collins, Marie T., 23. 

Colloids, 220. 


INDEX 


Comte, August, 37. 

Conative tendencies, 177, 284, 288— 
93; as cosmic agencies, 290. 

Concepts, analysis of, 17; non-mechan-_ 
ical, 155-56; ultimate physical, 235. 

Conduct, moral, 399-425. 

Conflict, its function in pragmatic doc- 
trine, 386. 

Conklin, Edwin Grant, 140, 142, 178. 

Conscience, 401, 405, 407, 408. 

Consciousness, 262, 264, 274, 275, 279, 
280, 308-13, 314; and self-conscious- 
ness, 312-13; as inner experience, 
309-10; as a relation, 310-12; dis- 
tinguished from mind, 308-09; its re 
lation to the body, 324-25. 

Conservation, 419. 

Contingency, the new philosophy of, 
33440. 

Cooke, George Willis, 32. 

Codéperation, 137-40. 

Copernicus, 80, 115. 

Cosmology, 55, 60-208. 

Cosmos, 2, 60-74. 

Creation, of life, 97; of matter, 97. 

Creative agency, 89, 98-100, 178. 

Creative evolution, 77, 81, 93-103, 134, 
222. 

Creative intelligence, 301-04, 307, 387, 
395. 

Creative synthesis, 94—96, 260, 262. 

Creative will, 76, 103. 

Creighton, J. E., 12, 249. 

Crile, G. W., 223. 

Criteria of truth, 391. 

Critical analysis, in philosophical 
method, 50-51. 

Croce, Benedetto, 439. 

Crookes, Sir William, 228. 

Curie, Professor and Mme., 228. 


Dance, 429, 432, 434, 441. 

Dante, 7-8, 149, 152. 

Darwin, Charles, 80, 86, 98, 105-07, 
111-34, 140, 142, 181. 

Darwin, Erasmus, 112. 

Darwinism, 115-20, 340; difficulties in, 
120-21; its assumptions, 117-20. 
See also Organic evolution. 

Datum, 370-72. 

Death, 187-88, 190. 

Decadence, 202. 

Deism, 169. 

De Laguna, Theodore, 425. 

Democritus, 37, 79, 96, 135, 149, 218. 


INDEX 


Descartes, 12, 53, 54, 80, 91, 92, 149, 
211, 245, 271, 320; his theory of 
mind, 268. 

Design, in nature, 143-66. 

Desires, limitation of, 415, 423. 

Determinism, 328-31, 333-43. 

DeTunzelmann, G. W., 234. 

Development. See Evolution. 

Devotion, 424-25. 

De Vries, Hugo, 122-23, 131. 

Dewey, John, 45-46, 54, 281; 348-49, 
372, 375, 382, 384, 396, 397, 398, 425. 

Dickinson, G. Lowes, 452. 

Diderot, 221. 

Dimension, the fourth, 66-69. 

Diogenes, 202. 

Discipline, 415, 423; in evolution, 139. 

Dodson, George R.., 35. 

Double-aspect theory, 273, 280, 318-20. 

Doubt, 38-39. 

Drake, Durant, 30, 178, 182, 208, 369, 
370, 373, 418, 425. 

Dramatists, Greek, 7. 

Driesch, Hans, 92, 98, 104. 

Dualism, 56, 209-16, 222; defined, 210; 

- metaphysical, 210, 211, 215; psycho- 
physical, 212; theories of mind, 271— 
72. 

Duration, Bergson’s theory of, 70-71. 

Durkheim, Emile, 32. 

Duty, 400-02, 405, 420-22, 424. 

Dynamism, 217, 234, 236. 


Earth, 60-61, 73-74. 

Earthquakes, 191. 

East, E. M., 34. 

Eckhart, Meister, 44. 

Eddington, A. 8., 66, 68, 69, 72, 74, 102. 

Edison, Thomas A., 25. 

Edman, Irwin, 26, 35, 54, 182, 425, 
434, 435, 452. 

Effort, 233, 293. 

Ego, absolute, 248. 

Ego-centric predicament, 358-60, 363. 

Egoism, 138. 

Einfihlung. See Empathy. 

Einstein, Albert, 22, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 
72, 74. 

Elan vital, 100, 290, 339. 

Electricity, 219; as ultimate form of 
physical reality, 229; nature of, 231— 
32; positive and negative, 235. 

Electrons, 61-62, 224, 229-32, 235. 

Elements, chemical, 229; of reality, 
225. 


455 


Ellwood, Charles A., 32. 

Emergence, theory of, 95-96, 321-26. 

Emergent evolution, 101, 134-36. 

Emerson, 29-44. 

Empathy, 431-32, 442-43. 

Empedocles, 211, 246, 254. 

Empiricism, 845-51; immediate, 382; 
radical, 258, 381-85. 

Ends, in nature, 143-66. 

Energetics, 232. 

Energism, as a theory of mind, 288; 
as a theory of morals, 411-20, 
423. 

Energy, 96-97, 224, 232-37; as psy- 
chical, 233-84, 284, 285; biotic, 99, 
100; conservation of, 214-15; crea- 
tive, 96-97; hormic, 289. 

Entelechy, of Driesch, 92. 

Epicureans, 9-10, 38, 149. 

Epicurus, 149, 409. 

Epigenesis, 134. 

Epiphenomenalism, 270-71, 320. 

Epistemology, 7, 24, 57-58, 344-73, 

Essence, 370-72. 

Eternal, 316. 

Ether, 71-73, 221, 232, 235, 236. 

Ethics, 7, 58, 251, 399-425; and re- 
ligion, 424-25; ethical theories, 409— 
24; hedonistic, 187. 

Eucken, Rudolph, 12, 175, 340. 

Euclidean geometry, 256. 

Euclidean space, 64. 

Eugenics, 419, 420. 

Euripides, 7. 

Everett, W. G., 12, 343, 412-14, 422, 
425. 

Evil, classification of evils, 186; moral, 
186-89, 192; physical, 189; the prob- 
lem of, 183-208, 258. 

Evolution, 94, 100-01, 221, 256; and 
religion, 106-07; as achievement, 
103; as method, 108; as realization of 
values, 141; as self-expression, 135; 
as strategy, 136-39; creative, 78, 81, 
93-103, 134, 156, 179, 222; creative 
drift in, 137, 156; Darwin’s theory of, 
115-17; definition of, 105-06; direc- 
tion of, 140; emergent, 101, 134-36; 
general or cosmic, 84; history of, 111; 
its significance reduced, 260; La- 
marck’s theory of, 112-15; Spen- 
cerian, 109-11; unknown causes of, 
129-32. 

Experience, 383-85; absolute, 249. 

Expression theory, 321-22. 


456 


Fact, of experience, 24. 

Faith, 167. 

Fatalism, 258. 

Fechner, G. H., 98, 273; his idealism, 
245. 

Fichte, J. G., 98, 248, 253. 

Final causes, 20-21, 148-46. 

Fine Arts. See Art. 

Fiske, John, 182. 

Flewelling, R. T., 12, 250. 

Force, 224. 

Form, 225, 267, 306, 322, 323. 

Fourth dimension, 66-69. 

Fox, George, 44. 

France, Anatole, 74. 

Freedom, 138—40, 228, 247; in the new 
pluralism, 258, 260; meaning of, 327— 
28; of the will, 50, 327-43; the 
struggle for, 156. 

Free-will, 327-43, 380, 381. 

Freud, Sigmund, 284. 

Freudian philosophy of mind, '283-85. 

Freudian psychology, 274, 275, 288. 

Freudian wish, 284, 288-89. 

Frohman, Charles, 187. 

Fullerton, George Stuart, 343. 


Galaxy, or Galactic System, 60-61. 

Galileo, 80, 115, 365. 

Galsworthy, John, 9. 

Geddes and Thomson, 99, 125, 130, 
142. 

Gentile, Giovanni, 316. 

Geometry, new systems of, 52. 

Germ-plasm, continuity of, 125-27. 

Gibbs, Sir Philip, 202. 

Gibson, Boyce, 340. 

God, 27, 29, 30, 33, 40, 44, 76, 98, 134, 
136, 145, 149, 150, 152, 159, 160, 
164, 165, 184-86, 247, 258, 380, 412; 
Aristotle’s conception of, 226; as 
creative energy, 176-78; as embodi- 
ment of ideal perfections, 171; as the 
soul of the world, 176; as totality of 
values, 261, 450-52; attributes of, 
172; definition of terms, 169; evolu- 
tion of the idea of, 167; in Berkeley’s 
system, 362—63; in human experience, 
170-72, 176, 177; in idealistic sys- 
tems, 174; in science and philosophy 
of the present, 174-78; James’s con- 
ception of, 172-74; the problem of, 
167-82. 

Goethe, 7-8, 80, 111, 184, 149, 161, 


INDEX 


Goldsmith, Wm. M., 116. 
Gomperz, H., 12. 
Good, in Plato, 148; its relation to de- 
sire, 261; good and evil, 184, 186. 
Good, the highest, 399, 401, 403, 408—- 
24. 

Good will, 206, 207, 406, 421. 

Gordon, Kate, 452. 

Gorgias, 37. 

Gravitation, Einstein’s theory of, 68; 
law of, 22-23. 

Greek atomists, 228. 

Greek skepticism, 37-88. 

Greeks, the ancient, 5, 141, 220, 374-75. 

Green, T. H., 249, 253. 


Haeckel, Ernst, 221, 237. 

Haldane, J. 8., 82, 103, 153, 165. 

Haldane, Viscount, 153-56. 

Hamlet, 256. 

Happiness, in moral theory, 400, 409— 
11, 423. 

Hardy, Thomas, 199. 

Harmony, preéstablished, 318, 319. 

Harrison, Jane Ellen, 32. 

Hartog, Marcus, 100. 

Hebrew philosophy, 98, 175. 

Hedonism, 187, 409-11, 423. 

Hegel, 52, 96, 98, 141, 175, 226, 253; 
his theory of art, 488; idealism of, 
248. 

Henderson, Archibald, 61. 

Henderson, L. J., 85-86, 155-58, 166. 

Heraclitus, 262. 

Heredity, 124-27, 133, 291. 

Hibben, J. G., 9, 216. 

Hirn, Yrj6, 431, 432, 452. 

Hobbes, Thomas, 149, 221, 410. 

Hobhouse, L. T., 101, 160, 165, 286, 
293,378, 425: 

Hocking, William E., 182, 253. 

Hoeffding, Harald, 35, 319. 

Hoernlé, R. F. A., 155, 166, 236, 249, 
304, 373. 

Holbach, 221. 

Holt, Edwin B., 277, 278, 287, 316, 
367, 373. 

Homer, 8. 

Horace, 8. 

Howison, G. H., 249, 250, 262, 343. 

Humanism. See Pragmatism. 

Hume, David, 12, 19, 20, 38, 53, 274, 
286, 343, 346; his theory of mind, 
268, 269. 

Hunt, Leigh, 194. 


INDEX 


Huxley, T. H., 26, 39, 70, 270, 360. 
Hylozoism, 222. 
Hypothesis, in scientific method, 47-50. 


Ibsen, 9, 181. 

Idealism, 66, 217, 238-52, 320-21; 
absolute, 248; as interpretation of 
the world, 251; Berkeleian, 241-42; 
criticism of, 251-52; epistemological, 
355-66; idealistic theory of art, 451; 
modern English and American, 248; 
objective, 248-49; of Hegel, 248; of 
Kant, 247; of Leibniz, 242-43; pan- 
psychic, 243-46; personalistic, 249— 
50; Platonic, 240; subjective, 241-42, 
356-66; theistic, 248; theories of, 
239-50; voluntaristic, 246-47. 

Ideals, 252. 

Ideals, ethical and religious, 178, 180. 

Ideas, 252; as plans of action, 392; in- 
nate, 345-47; Platonic, 147-49. 

identity hypothesis, 319. 

Idols, Baconian, 46. 

Imagination, in fine arts, 435. 

Immanence, 180. 

- Immortality, 247, 413-16, 416-17. 

Impulse, 81, 177, 282; creative im- 
pulse in art, 430-35; formative im- 
pulses in evolution, 141, 252; vital, 
100, 118. 

Indeterminism. See Freedom of the 
Will. 

Individuality, 134, 154. 

Infinite, 62, 64, 173, 175. 

Inheritance of acquired 
112-15, 117. 

Innate Ideas, 345-47. 

Instincts, 276-77, 290. 

Instincts, evolution of, 116. 

Instrumentalism, 281, 375, 377, 385— 
86. 

Intelligence, 277, 282, 294; creative, 
301-04, 307, 387, 395; pragmatic doc- 
trine of, 385-86, 395. 

Interaction of mind and body, 212-15, 
318. 

Intuition, 44-45, 346; Bergsonian, 44. 

Intuitionism, 420-24. 

Ionian School, 210. 


characters, 


Jacks, L. P., 12, 31. 

James, William, 4, 10, 11, 12, 35, 40, 
41, 53, 65, 172-74, 176, 177, 188, 192, 
200, 208, 251, 264, 273, 309, 312, 316, 
821-22, 348; his pluralism, 257-59, 


457 


262; his pragmatism, 376-78, 379-81, 
384, 390, 395, 397; on freedom, 335- 
37. 

Jastrow, Morris, 35. 

Jehovah, 28. 

Jesus, 32, 407, 411. 

Joachim, H. H., 249. 

Job, book of, 183. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 357-58. 

Johnstone, James, 91, 92, 97, 103. 

Jordan, David Starr, 195. 

Journals, philosophical, 12. 

Jung, C. J., 284. 

Justice, as subsistent entity, 261, 


Kallen, Horace Meyer, 258, 377, 446. 

Kant, Immanuel, 40, 53, 73, 154, 161, 
170, 175, 226, 250; his ethical theory, 
420-24; his phenomenalism, 361; his 
philosophy of mind, 269; his theory 
of esthetic pleasure, 439; idealism of, 
247, , 

Keats, 8. 

Kellogg, Vernon L., 92, 108, 122, 130, 
142, 

Kelvin, Lord, 228. 

Keyser, Cassius J., 54. 

Klyce, Scudder, 40. 

Knight, William, 438, 452. 

Knowledge, as contemplative, 349-51; 
its conditions, 349; sources of, 345— 
55; the genetic approach, 346-49; 
theories of, 57, 58, 344-73; truth and 
validity of, 355-72. 

Korschinsky, 122. 

Korzybski, Alfred, 42-43. 

Kilpe, Oswald, 216, 272. 


Ladd, George T., 27, 272. 

Laird, John, 296, 299-300, 302, 316. 

Lamarck, 112-16, 130, 132, 141. 

Lamettrie, 221. 

Lane, H. H., 142. 

Lange, F. A., 287. 

Langfeld, Herbert Sidney, 442, 452. 

Laplace, 73. 

Law, as ‘‘cosmic habit,’’ 258; not a 
force or governing power, 21-22; of 
nature, 14, 21-23. 

League of Nations, 197, 419. 

Leibniz, 53, 149, 197, 228, 254, 318; his 
conception of reality, 226; his ideal- 
ism, 242-43. 

Leighton, J. A., 74, 103, 165, 166, 216, 
316, 350. 


458 


Levels, theory of, 94, 96, 219, 260. 

Lewes, George Henry, 322. 

Lewis, Sinclair, 203. 

Libertarianism, 334. 

Libido, 288. 

Life, interpretation of, 3; as ultimate 
reality, 227. 

Life (organic), 75-103; as organization, 
77, 93-95, 99; as value, 140-41, 153- 
55; autonomy of, 89-91; creative 
evolution of, 93-103; difficulties in 
the mechanistic theory of, 80-91; 
insurgency of, 90, 332; mechanistic 
view of, 79-91; on other planets, 84— 
87; origin of, 75-77; properties of, 
77-78; spontaneous generation of, 
75-77; the nature of, 77-103; vitalis- 
tic view of, 91-93; as highest good, 
402-404. 

Lindsay, Vachel, 217. 

Linnzeus, 116, 134. 

Lipps, Theodore, 442. 

Lock, Robert Heath, 120. 

Locke, John, 12, 53, 342, 347, 364. 

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 222, 230. 

Loeb, Jacques, 80, 103, 165, 223. 

Logic, 7, 25. See also Theory of 
Knowledge. 

Lotze, 214, 272, 302. 

Lovejoy, Arthur O., 282, 283, 369, 398. 

Loyalty, 413, 415. 

Lubbock, Sir John, 197. 

Lucretius, 7, 75, 111, 188, 220, 228, 
340. 

Lull, Richard S., 142, 

Luther, 407. 

Luxuries, 205. 


McCabe, Joseph, 162, 301, 397. 

McConnell, Francis J., 182. 

McDougall, William, 216, 265, 
286, 289, 319, 326, 341. 

McGiffert, Arthur C., 35, 182. 

McGilvary, E. B., 312. 

McTaggart, J. M. E., 249, 
342. 

Macfarlane, John M., 100. 

Mach, Ernst, 26, 360. 

Macintosh, Douglas Clyde, 54, 
392. 

Maeterlinck, 418. 

Marshall, Henry Rutgers, 444, 452. 

Marvin, F. 8., 141, 428. 

Marvin, W. T., 11, 20, 237, 367, 372. 

Materialism, 56, 217-37, 238-39; 


271, 
250, 316, 


372, 


INDEX 


difficulties with, 223-227; French, 
221; German, 221; general defini- 
tion of, 217-18; history of, 220; in 
the science of the present, 236; in the 
twentieth century, 222-23; its rela- 
tion to Naturalism, 218-19; of 
Haeckel, 221. 

Mathematics, 64, 353-54. 

Mathews, Albert P., 99. 

Matter, 66, 212, 305; as singularities 
in the space-time continuum, 69; 
as substratum, 224; conservation of, 
221; our changing conceptions of, 
223; recent conceptions of, 238-39; 
as an obstruction, 338. 

Mead, G. H., 377. 

Meaning, 13; of life, 1, 5; of the world, 
2, 3, 148, 150. 

Mechanism, 78-91, 98, 102, 211, 222; 
as opposed to purpose, 144, 149-150, 
151-152; as world view, 220; history 
of, 79-80. 

Medieval philosophy, 211. 


Melancholia, 194. 


Meliorism, 197. 

Mendel, laws of, 83, 126-27, 131. 

Metaphysics, definition, 6-7, 23. 

Method, deductive, 51-52; genetic, 
107; in philosophy, 36, 45-54; in 
science, 46-48; logical-analytical, 51; 
of critical analysis, 50-51. 

Meyer, Max F., 277. 

Milky Way, 61. 

Mill, John Stuart, 20, 149, 186, 208, 
410, 422, 425. 

Mills, John, 16, 230, 237. 

Milton, 170. 

Mind, animistic theories of, 271-72; as 
a form of energy, 285; as an achieve- 
ment, 307; as cosmic agency, 101, 
136; as fruition of the body, 306; as 
immanent in the world, 159-60; as 
moving cause, 147; as spirit, 306; 
as substance, 268; as world goal, 307; 
behavioristic theories of, 277-80; 
distinguished from consciousness and 
other related terms, 264-65; double- 
aspect theories of, 273; Freudian 
theory of, 283-85; history of theories 
of, 263-86; idealistic theories of, 272— 
73; is what it does, 301—05; its crea- 
tive power, 283; its peculiar powers, 
302-04; materialistic theories of, 270— 
71; mental processes defined, 276-77; 
objective methods of study, 275-80; 


INDEX 


our changing notions of, 239; phil- 
osophy of, 56-57, 203, 288-316; 
pragmatic theory of, 280-83; recent 
views of, 273-85. 

Mind-body Problem, 210, 212-15, 297— 
99, 317-26. 

Mind-stuff, 244, 252. 

Minkowski, H., 67, 69. 

Mitokinetism, 100. 

Moleschott, 221. 

Moliére, 80. 

Monads, Leibniz’ theory of, 226, 228, 
243. 

Monism, 56, 209-10, 215; materialistic, 
217; of Haeckel, 221; psychical, 242, 
320; spiritualistic, 217; the monistic 
impulse, 255. 

Monotheism, 169. 

Montague, W. P., 11, 285, 312, 351, 
367, 384, 445. 

Moore, A. W., 377, 397. 

Moore, Benjamin, 85, 97, 99, 100, 
103. 

Moore, G. E., 12, 367, 369, 373, 392. 

Moore, George Foot, 35. 

~ Moral, judgment, 399, 405; laws, 403, 
406, 416-17, 421; theory, 399-425; 
values, 399-425. 

Morale, social, 417-18, 433-34. 

Morality, 399-425; among primitive 
men, 404-06; and religion, 424-25; 
evolution of, 406-08; hedonistic, 409- 
11; intuitional, 420-24; of the lower 
animals, 402-04; theories of, 409-24; 
theory of energism, 411-13. 

More, L. T., 26. 

More, Paul Elmer, 164. 

Morgan, C. Lloyd, 12, 94, 101-02, 134, 
135-36, 142, 322, 326. 

Morris, G. 8., 249. 

Moulton, F. R., 73. 

Moving cause, 98. 

Muirhead, J. H., 253. 

Miinsterberg, Hugo, 247, 452. 

Murray, David Leslie, 393, 398. 

Music, sources of esthetic pleasure in, 
448—49, 

Mutations, 122—24, 130. 

Mysteries, Greek, 267. 

Mysticism, 44-45, 345, 346. 

Mystics, 172; Christian, 44. 


Nageli, 98, 122. 


Natural Selection, 80, 99, 116, 117, 127— 


32, 133. 


459 


Naturalism, 218-20, 221, 222, 233, 236, 
237. 

Nature, laws of, 21-23; cruelty of, 190- 
92; wastefulness of, 190. 

Nebular Hypothesis, 73. 

Necessity, in the free-will controversy, 
328-31. 

Neo-Platonists, 44, 175, 267, 437-38. 

Neo-Realism, 278, 279, 367-69. 

Neutral entities, 279, 371. 

Neutral Monism, 279. 

Newcomb, Simon, 22. 

New Realism. See Neo-Realism. 

Newton, 22, 23, 49, 65, 80, 115, 149. 

Nicomachean Ethics, 412-25. 

Nietzsche, Fr., 98, 181. 

Nominalism, 378. 

Nous, 211. 

Novelties in nature, 94-96. 

Nunn, Ps 234: 

Nutting, C. C., 132. 


Obligation, sense of, 401, 405, 420-24. 
Occan, William of, 80. 
Occasionalists, 318. 

Omar Khayyam, 7, 8, 183, 198. 
Ontology, 55-56, 209-16, 236-37. 
Optimism, 152, 184, 197, 204. 
Organism, 77, 95-96, 155-56. 
Organization, 77, 95-96, 225-26. 
Organizing agency, 83-85, 96-103. 
Organizing principle, 99, 176-77. 
Orthogenesis, 121-22, 156. 
Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 104, 131. 


Pain, 189, 192. 

Paleontology, 122-51. 

Paley, William, 150-52. 

Palmer, George Herbert, 343. 

Panpsychism, 242-46, 320. 

Pantheism, 169, 363. 

Parallelism, 319. 

Parker, Dewitt H., 316, 322, 452. 

Parsimony, law of, 80. 

Pasteur, Louis, 75. 

Patten, William, 97, 100, 186-40, 142, 
178, 289. 

Paulsen, Friedrich, 11, 141, 165, 208, 
237, 244, 245, 246, 273, 286, 326, 343, 
AS. 

Pearson, Karl, 11, 19, 20, 21, 26, 360. 

Perfection theory of morals, 411-20. 

Perry, Ralph Barton, 7, 11, 12, 26, 233, 
235, 236, 237, 278, 316, 343, 358, 367, 
369, 372. 


460 


Persia, religion of, 210, 215. 

Personalism, 248-50, 451. 

Personalist, 12, 250. 

Personality, 227, 299-301, 305, 307, 
412; enlargement of, 432. 

Pessimism, 183-208, 258; among col- 
lege students, 195; causes of, 194; the 
lure of, 198; theory of, 192. 

Phaedo of Plato, 240, 267. 

Phenomena, 37. 

Phenomenalism, 247, 361. , 

Philosophy, as comprehensive know- 
ledge, 15; as reflective inquiry, 17; as 
synoptic view of life, 16; criticisms of, 
15; definition of, 1-9; etymology, 6; 
history of, 52-53; introduction to, 
53-54; its object, 15; its subject 
matter, 15, 16; progress of as com- 
pared with science, 40-41. 

Physics, the new, 235, 256. 

Pierce, Charles, 277. 

Pitkin, Walter B., 367. 

Planetesimal hypothesis, 73. 

Planets, life on the, 84-87, 

Plato, 5, 9, 12, 23, 37, 40, 53, 98, 147, 
163, 164, 165, 175, 198, 209, 226, 
254, 261, 450; his idealistic theory, 
240; his theory of the soul, 266-67; 
on immortality, 315; theory of 
beauty, 436, 437; theory of morals, 
411. 

Play, 440-41; play motive in the art 
impulse, 434-35; the play theory of 
art, 439-42. 

Pleasure, 409-11, 445; sesthetic, 426- 
52) 

Plotinus, 44, 267, 437-38. 

Pluralism, 56, 209, 236, 254-62; in 
Spaulding’s New Rationalism, 259- 
61; its older forms, 254, 255; new 
forms of, 259-61; of James, 257. 

Poetry and philosophy, 7, 

Poets, the philosopher-poets, 7. 

Poincaré, 11. 

Point-event, 66, 103. 

Polytheism, 169. 

Pope, Alexander, 191. 

Positive philosophy, 36-37. 

Positivism, 36-37, 39, 219, 378. 

Postulates, method of, 51. 

Pragmatism, 58, 59, 374-98; and re- 
ligion, 377-78; as a method, 378-79; 
as humanism, 374, 377; as instru- 
mentalism, 385; criticism of, 395-97; 
its permanent contributions, 394-95; 


INDEX 


its radical empiricism, 381-85; its 
theory of mind, 280-83, 325; its 
theory of truth, 390-94; meaning of 
term, 374; origin of, 376-77. 

Pratt, James B., 182, 369, 392, 397. 

Preéstablished harmony, 318, 319. 

Prejudice, 46-47. 

Prime Mover, 148. 

Pringle-Pattison, A. Seth, 166, 182. 

Progress, 138, 178-80, 201; implying. 
freedom, 339-40; in philosophy and 
in science, 40—43. 

Proton, 230, 231. 

Psyche, 266. 

Psychical Monism, 272-73, 320. 

Psychology, 57-154, 251, 264. 

Psycho-physical parallelism, 319. 

Puffer, Ethel D., 443-44, 452. 

Punishment, 189; theory of, 334. 

Purpose, 9; immanent purposiveness, 
154; in inorganic nature, 156-58; in 
nature, 143-66; in pragmatic theory, 
386-87; in the new pluralism, 261. 

Push or Pull, 164, 165. 

Pyrrho, 37. 


Qualities, primary and secondary, 365- 
66. 
Quantum theory, 235. 


Radio-activity, 74-87, 223, 230. 

Radium, 229. 

Rand, Benjamin, 11, 425. 

Rashdall, H., 250. 

Rationalism, 345-46, 347-49; forms of, 
351-55; of Descartes and Spinoza, 
352; of Kant, 353; of Plato, 351; the 
new, 353-55. 

Realism, critical, 366-67; epistemo- 
logical, 8366-72; naive, 366; Platonic, 
356, 368; representative, 367; the 
new, 259-61, 367-69, 371; the new 
critical, 369-72; transfigured, 367; 
types of, 366-67. 

Reality, theories of, 209-16; uses of the 
term, 225. 

Realization, world a process of, 149. 

Reason, as source of Knowledge, 344—- 
55. See also Rationalism. 

Relations, 259; internal, 368; objective, 
368. 

Relativity, theory of, 67-70, 72, 102, 
235; its idealistic interpretation, 69. 

Religion, 248; and ethics, 31, 425; and 
humility, 33-35; and philosophy, 27- 


INDEX 


35; and science, 179, 224; compara- 
tive study of, 31; definitions of, 28- 
29, 34; influence of philosophy upon, 
30-31; its function, 28; of Jesus, 32; 
social character of, 31-33; the mood 
of, 26. 

Reminiscence, Plato’s theory of, 266. 

Repose, in esthetic experience, 439, 
443-44, 448. 

Responsibility, in the free-will con- 
troversy, 334. 

Restraint, 181. 

Revolt, spirit of, 181. 

Rhythm, 441, 449. 

Richardson, C. A., 262. 

Right and Wrong, 399-400. See also 
Moral Theory. 

Righteousness, the power that makes 
for, 33. 

Ritter, W. E., 90. 

Robertson, T. B., 69, 

Robinson, James Harvey, 355. 

Rogers, Arthur Kenyon, 11, 182, 184, 
253, 369, 397. 

Ross, E. A., 186, 205. 

- Rousseau, J. J., 181. 

Royce, Josiah, 12, 23, 35, 40, 175, 182, 
208, 249, 252, 253, 257, 272, 316, 343, 
398, 421, 425. 

Ruskin, 439. 

Russell, Bertrand, 11, 20, 38, 51, 54, 
186, 216/285, 237,:309,'313,; 316; 331, 
343, 360, 373, 398. 

Rutherford, Sir Ernest, 228, 231. 


Santayana, George, 12, 289, 354, 369, 
371, 451-52. 

Sappho, 8. 

Savonarola, 407. 

Schelling, 98. 

Schiller, F. C. S., 340, 343, 378, 393, 
398. 

Schiller, J. C. F., 434, 440-41. 

Schneider, Herbert W., 396. 

Schopenhauer, F., 98, 193, 208, 226, 
246, 438, 449, 452. 

Science and philosophy, 13; applied, 
25, 41-43; as quantitative, 16; defini- 
tion, 13, 14; normative, 52, 399-400; 
practical, 399-400; the work of, 14. 

~ Seashore, Carl E., 449. 

Selection, natural, 80, 99, 116, 117, 127- 
Be, a3, 

Self, 299-301; absolute, 249; in Hume’s 
philosophy of mind, 268, 269. 


461 


Self-control, 181, 415, 423. 

Self-denial, 180, 

Self-determination, 342. 

Self-expression, in art, 430, 448. 

Self-realization, 411-20, 423. 

Self-sacrifice, 137—40. 

Sellars, Roy Wood, 74, 94, 103, 166, 
216, 219, 326, 369. 

Sensationalism, 345-46, 351. 
Sensations, as sources of knowledge, 
348-51; as stimuli to action, 350. 

Sense data, 24, 360, 370, 371. 

Service, 138. 

Shakespeare, 8. 

Shapley, Harlow, 74. 

Shaw, Bernard, 9, 132, 181. 

Shearman, J. N., 151. 

Shelley, 8, 44. 

Sherrington, C. 8., 316. 

Sidgwick, Henry, 11, 141, 216. 

Sin, 186, 187. 

Sinclair, May, 253. 

Skeptics, Greek, 38. 

Skepticism, 37-40, 258. 

Slosson, Edwin E., 67, 222. 

Smith, William Benjamin, 165, 166. 

Social Function of Art, 431-34. 

Social morale, 417, 433. 

Social resonance, the principle of, in 
art, 431-382, 443. 

Social welfare, 404, 405, 413-20. 

Socrates, 6, 9, 37, 147, 409. 

Solar System, 60-61. 

Solidarity, social, 418-20. 

Solipsism, 359-60. 

Sophists, 37. 

Sophocles, 1, 7, 183, 407. 

Soul, 262, 274, 299-301; as a value, 
314-16; as distinguished from mind,. 
294, 295, 314; immortality of, 267, 
314-16; in Greek philosophy, 266; 
Plato’s theory of, 266-67; search for 
the, 57, 263-316. 

Space, 61-73, 256; perceptual, 62-63; 


conceptual, 63-64; Euclidean, 64; 
mathematical, 64-65; Space-Time, 
65-70, 236. 


Spaulding, Edward Gleason, 12, 94, 
180, 259-62, 302, 313, 367, 373, 398. 

Spencer, Herbert, 39, 53, 81, 98, 109— 
114181) 1354170. 223, 2005 sey 
theory of art, 440-41; his theory of 
beauty, 434, 441. 

Spinoza, 40, 98, 149, 175, 222, 261, 273, 
319-20. 


462 


Spirit, 29; how different from mind, 
264; meaning of the term, 306, 307, 
Bye fl 

Spiritual, 29, 304; the spiritual world, 
173-74. 

Spiritualism, 56, 217, 223, 238-52; de- 
fined, 240. 

Spirituality, 29-30; definition of, 30. 

Spontaneity, 331-37. 

Spontaneous generation, 75-77, 221. 

Starbuck, Edwin D., 35. 

Stars, 60-61. 

Stawell, F. Melian, 141. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 257. 

Stoics, 9-10, 38, 175. 

Stout, G.-T., 250. 

Strategy, evolution as, 136-39. 

Striving, 188, 193, 252, 288, 307. 

Strong, C. A., 244, 273, 286, 287, 326, 
369. 

Structure, 94. 

Struggle for existence, 116-19, 133, 156. 

Stuart, H. W., 377. 

Sturt, Henry, 250, 343. 

Subjective idealism, 241-42, 356-66. 

Subjectivism, 356-66; criticism of, 
363. 

Subsistents, 259. 

Substance, 211. 

Suggestion, in scientific method, 47-50. 

Sully, James, 208. 

Sumner, Francis B., 166. 

Sun, 60-61. 

Supernatural, meaning of the, 33. 

Survival of the fittest, 116-17, 131, 133, 
181. 

Swain, Richard La Rue, 182. 

Swinburne, 8. 

Sympathy, 432, 433. 

Synopsis of subjects, 55-59. 

Synthesis, creative, 94-96, 260, 262. 


Tansley, A. G., 284-86. 

Taylor, A. F., 249, 342. 

Teleology, 73, 96, 143-66; the new, 
160-65, 292-93, 307. See also Final 
Causes. 

Tennyson, 44. 

Teresa, Saint, 44. 

Thales, 2, 209, 210. 

Theism, 168, 169. 

Theory of levels, 94, 96, 219, 260. 

Thermo-dynamics, second law of, 88— 
89. 

Thilly, Frank, 11, 


INDEX 


Thinking, reflective, 45-50. 

Thomson, J. Arthur, 11, 13-14, 26, 54, 
82-838, 96, 108, 122, 124, 134, 142, - 
166, 208, 215. 

Thomson, James, 199. 

Thomson, J. J., 228. 

Thorndike, Ashley H., 226, 227. 

Thought, 295, 299, 349, 355. 

Time, 64-65, 68-71; Alexander’s 
theory of, 69-70; as fourth dimen- 
sion, 67-68; Bergson’s theory of, 70- 
71; Space-Time, 65-70. 

Titchener, Edward B., 273, 442. 

Todd, vidisete. 

Transmission theory, 321-22. 

Truth, as fidelity, 389; the criterion of, 
391-94; theories of, 387-94; the 
pragmatic theory of, 390-94; the 
problem of, 398. 

Tufts, James H., 12, 377, 425. 

Tyler, John M., 415. 


Unconscious, the, 284. 

Unity, the search for, 4. 

Universe, 60-61; as ‘biocentric, 158; 
foundations of, 226, 227-37; the 
Riddle of the, 221. 

Unknowable, the, 109-10. 

Unna, Sarah, 11. 

Utilitarianism, 378, 409, 410-11. 


Value, 153-55; ideal, 252. 

Values, 18, 16-17, 58, 59, 179; ses- 
thetic, 412, 426; bodily, 412; charac- 
ter, 412-20; economic, 412; evolu- 
tion as realization of, 14, 185; idealis- 
tic interpretation of, 451; intellectual, 
412; in the new pluralism, 261; 
moral, 399-425; of association, 412; 
of recreation, 412; religious, 412; the 
higher values of life, 399-452. 

Variation, in organic evolution, 117-22. 

Verification, in scientific method, 47— 
50. 

Virgil, 8. 

Virtue, 400, 409; in the theory of 
morals, 399-425. 

Vital impetus, 100. 

Vitalism, 78, 91-93, 101, 102. 

Vital principle, 78, 91-93. 

Vogt, K., 221. 

Voltaire, 149, 191. 

Voluntarism, 246. 

Voluntaristic idealism, 246. 

Von Hartmann, 98. 


INDEX 


Wallace, Alfred Russel, 74, 86-87, 105. 

Wallace, Edwin, 40. 

War, 201. 

War, the Great, 34, 42, 140, 152, 179, 
181, 207. 

Ward, James, 11, 26, 41, 141, 165, 182, 
208, 237, 244, 250, 273, 287, 340, 342. 

Warren, Howard C., 166, 273, 279-80, 
286, 287. 

Watson, John, 12, 247, 253. 

Watson, John B., 277, 287, 297. 

Watson, William, 107, 190. 

Weber, Alfred, 237. 

Weismann, August, 125-26. 

Wells, H. G., 206, 207. 

Wenley, R. M., 12, 208. 

Westermarck, Edward, 425. 

Weyl, Walter E., 205. 

Whitehead, A. N., 54, 74, 236, 237, 
238-39, 366, 373. 

Whitman, Walt, 44. 


463 


246-47; creative, 233; freedom of, 
327-43. 

Will-to-live, 90, 118, 190, 193, 403, 438. 

Wilson, E. B., 83. 

Windelband, Wilhelm, 11, 161, 162-63, 
216, 301, 397. 

Wisdom, 6. 

Wish, Freudian, 284, 288-89. 

Wonder, 5. 

Woodbridge; F. J. E., 12, 302, 309, 
oa 

Wordsworth, 7, 44, 172. 

World, meaning of, 60-61; the chang- 
ing, 3. 

Worth, 195, 434, 440. 

Wright, Chauncey, 178. 

Wright, W. K., 35, 343. 

Wundt, W., 29, 94, 97, 98, 247. 


Xenophanes, 170. 


Will, 81, 193, 233-34, 341; absolute, '! Zoroaster, religion of, 210, 215, 


> SHG5 


Thay ‘ei 
at ae 








BD21 .P31 
Introduction to philosophy. 


Princeton Theological Seminary—Speer Library 


1 1012 00103 3036 





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